Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - Mini Show #32: The Art of Class War, Billionaire Taxes, Fox News, Rachel Maddow, Jack Dorsey, & More!

Episode Date: April 23, 2022

Krystal and Saagar talk about Rachel Maddow's future, Russophobia, billionaire taxes, Jack Dorsey, tax preparation companies, Fox News, and the art of class war with Max Alvarez!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/Max Alvarez: https://therealnews.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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out. So there's been a lot of discussion about Rachel Maddow, who is, of course, MSNBC by far their top-rated host who has a very devoted following. And she went through contract negotiations. She basically was able to secure for herself the ability to step back from her primetime 9 p.m. show where she has been for years and years and move to more of a weekly role. In addition, we've seen over the past several weeks, she has actually taken a hiatus and had her chair filled by a range of hosts. Ali Velshi was one. I think Eamon Boyle-Dean filled in. Sometimes they had sort of a rotating cast of characters who sat in the chair. So there's been a lot of speculation about how exactly this is all going to shape out. It's obviously very important for MSNBC that basically doesn't have a single other host that actually drives ratings. She returned to her show and addressed the plans directly.

So let's take a listen to what she had to say. So here's the plan. I'm back. I'm going to be here all this month, Monday through Thursday nights. Now, for big news events, for things like the lead up to the election, I will, of course, be here more than that. But that is the general plan. I will be here this month, Monday through Thursday nights. And then starting next month, starting in May, I'm going to be here weekly. I'm going to be here on Monday nights, again, to give myself just more time to work on some of this other stuff that I've got cooking for MSNBC and NBC. So Monday to Thursday nights this month, starting next month, I will be here

weekly. It's hard to overstate what a dramatic shift in the cable news landscape this ultimately is. I mean, we talk about all the time, like, putting their ideology and your feelings about these individuals aside. Basically, Tucker and Rachel are the only two people who really have this sort of, like, committed fan base where no matter where they are, no matter what time of day, they're going to show up for them. So for this to be the last month of Rachel doing her show Monday through Thursday and going to a weekly basis, this is a devastating situation for MSNBC. And just to put some numbers on it, we covered this before. While she was on leave, ratings dropped 26 percent, like that. Just 26 percent of the audience disappeared because it wasn't Rachel.

She went to great lengths, by the way, and I think this was also very telling at the beginning before that clip that we just showed to say, Ali Velshi did an amazing job and we're proud. We love him. He's great and he's a wonderful colleague and I'm so grateful to him and here he is in Ukraine and all of this stuff, which also made me wonder if he is the one that they ultimately have in mind for that slot. We had seen a report, it might be Alex Wagner that they fill in there, but if they are looking in the direction of Ali Velshi, you already know how that went. It doesn't do well.

Like 26% of your audience just poof, gone. Right. And that was with the expectation that she might come back. I mean, so Dylan Byers has a great piece in Puck News called the Rachel Maddow Iceberg over at NBC. And what he points to is they are paying her $30 million to basically produce some podcasts and then come on once a week. Now, to justify that, she has to bring in more than that in value. And maybe that is the case. I don't know. But he points to the real issue that NBC management has had, they've had almost 200 days since that new contract was negotiated. And their whole idea is a fourth hour of MSNBC's Morning Joe.

That was the brilliant plan. Right now, Joe Scarborough is the star of MSNBC, so much so he's got to be on the air for four straight hours because they have nobody else. Now, in terms of their bench, he points to the same thing. They don't have anybody they can realistically hire because there isn't really anybody else who is able to do that. You need to actually innovate within the format.

They don't actually want that. And at the same time, they really are screwed. Like what they point to is he would probably be better off is not having news at 9 p.m. and just putting Shark Tank on MSNBC. That might actually be a realistic,

probably better off for the country, too. Well, back when I was at MSNBC, I don't think they still do this, but they would play

that show Lock Up on the weekends. You know that show? It's like some trashy, like, inside the prison kind of a show. They would play that on the weekends because they didn't have, like, a full weekend lineup.

And it would outperform the news channel easily. So, yeah, they're in a real—I mean, it's impossible to succeed with the model that they have because, ultimately, what are they? Like, it's just Democratic Party cheerleading. And so they are totally subject to the whims of the news cycle. You know, CNN crushes them when it comes to some sort of breaking news event, like'll get another bump in the ratings and all of that. But in terms of having personalities that people are actually like care about what they have to say and are showing up just for that in terms of some sort of larger project, there's just not much there. So, Rachel, I understand why they threw basically whatever at her that she asked for and whatever schedule that she asked for because they don't have really anything else. And I think that they – I think they know that. Trump saved all of these networks during his years. They know that the cord cutters are here, that younger generations don't watch them, and they're increasingly sort of irrelevant to the public, and that their business model is, you know, they're fine for now, but it is sort of on shaky ground. They know all of that,

and they just have no answers because they can't break out of doing the same stale, partisan-friendly, corporate advertising-friendly content that their whole model is based on. We thought that the age of crazy Russophobia was gone, but unfortunately, let's go ahead and put this up there on the screen, runners from Russia and Belarus are not allowed to compete in the Boston Marathon this week. Quote, we must do what we can to show our support to the people of Ukraine, the chief of the Boston Athletic Commission said. Now, first of all, I think this is a very cowardly statement in order to make on the eve of the actual race itself. Yeah. Because many people who are possibly Russian and Belarusian had been training for this. They don't

say exactly how many Russian or Belarusian citizens were scheduled to run the race. But second, to ban the people of Russia from running in a race, which has long signified the international spirit of competition, it's routinely won by Kenyans, it's looked at as the top pinnacle event in the marathon sport. I just think it's completely outrageous. Our government policy has been and should be to punish the oligarchs and the elites of Russia, as well as Putin's government. But actual Russian citizens here competing in America's, you know, premier marathon competition, I think it's completely ludicrous.

It's not the fault of Russian athletes like Ovechkin or whoever these people are to set foreign policy of the nation of Russia. And I don't want our athletes getting treated this way whenever they compete in foreign – It's not their fault George W. Bush was, you know, for criminal and torture, for example, and they were never made to like, you know, like with Medvedev, where they're trying to make him to directly denounce Putin at potentially risk for his friends and his family. I mean, I really thought there's two things here. First of all, it's wrong morally, as you're pointing out. It's also stupid policy because you're playing into Putin's hands. I mean, what he's telling the Russian people is they hate you. They hate all of us. They want to destroy Russia. And so when you see, you know, young pianists making their debut getting canceled and Russian sports stars and marathon runners

getting canceled, you're playing into his hands. You are making his case that, yeah, we just hate Russia altogether and we just want to destroy the vast majority of the Russian people, including even, you know, some who very bravely protested the war effort and are very much in favor of peace. So it is not only morally wrong, it is also extremely stupid policy. And I thought Dr. Trita Parsi, when I talked to him, said it the best. He's like, on the one hand, we tell everybody, you know, there's no democracy here. All that matters is Putin and his cronies. And so it's 100 percent, you know, their fault and their policy and all of that. And on the other hand, we're going to punish the broad Russian people. Like, how does that make sense? Like, if it's not a democracy, then it's really it's not their fault at all. In fact,

you could say, you know, if you wanted to go down this road, you could say we were more culpable for Iraq war and all of that stuff, because at least we have some semblance of democratic representation. To punish the Russian people for the actions of Vladimir Putin, just there's a complete disconnect there that really, it will never stop not only irritating me but just saddening me to see this level of sort of Cold War hysteria returning. Yeah, and look, at the Olympic Games, I mean, frankly, athletes should be banned because they're cheaters. Because of the doping. Not because they're Russian, okay? Because they're plugged.

And by the way, that's not even really their fault. As I understand it, to be a Russian athlete, you don't get a lot of say over whether you're going to get plugged full of tests or not. Or whether the doctors are like, hey, just take this. They don't tell you what's in that. And I think that's wrong and incredibly exploitative. But in terms of fairness, that's why they should be banned in terms of testing what exactly is going on here. But instead, they're being banned for their actual identity. And I think that that

is just so screwed up. Once again, the spirit of marathoning and running was born from community, from wanting people to inspire themselves. I recently attended a race just as a spectator. And the overwhelming feeling of joy at the end of these things is amazing. Like love and support. Yeah, and regular folks are just like, you know, you get up early on a Sunday

or whatever and you run just to run to feel good. And that is what we should encourage for all of these types of events. So it makes me very sad in order to see this happen. And, you know, there's a sizable Russian population who lives in New York City as well. We were just there. There's a lot of Russians who live there. So, you know, what are they supposed to do?

It's just not right. Yeah, indeed. All right, guys, thanks for watching. More for you later. We have some new reporting from ProPublica that exposes just how much income billionaires are making, according to the IRS, and also just how little in taxes they are paying. They go really deep here.

I really encourage you to read the whole report, but let's go ahead and throw this tear sheet up on the screen. The big takeaway is they say, in theory, our tax system is designed to tax the rich at higher rates than everyone else. That is not the way it works at the loftiest incomes. The data reveals a system where the very highest earners on average pay far lower tax rates than the merely affluent do. And even among the top 400, some groups have it better than others. Tech billionaires in particular pay rates well below even other business owners. More specifics here, they say on average, the rate of income tax that

people pay does climb as incomes ascend, that's a progressive taxation system, into the top 1%. But when you get to the range of 2 million to 5 million, that trend stops. The group earning in this range, composed mostly of business owners and workers with extremely high salaries paid an average income tax rate of 29% from 2013 to 2018. And after that, once you get behind the two to five million dollar range, then average tax rates actually drop the further up in income you go. So it's the exact opposite dynamic of what our tax code is supposed to be. Obviously what it's supposed to be, progressive taxation system, the more income you earn, the more you pay in taxes. What they're saying is once you, that works up to a point,

and then above that, the dynamic actually reverses and it's actively regressive. And the more that you earn, the less that you pay. Yeah, it's completely and utterly insane. You know, I've talked about this here, which is that one of the things that bothers me is that top 1% really actually does miss the mark. I'm not saying I feel deep sympathy for the doctors and lawyers of America. Right. I'm not saying that they pay a far higher tax rate and have far more on top of them than a Warren Buffett, than a Clifford Asness, than all the wealthy tech billionaires here who are paying effective tax rates of 22%, largely because of the way that they carry their wealth on stock, borrow against that. Then when they need to parry back their loans, they sell stock that they've usually held for longer than the period and they can only pay 15% on that and then use that to pay back their very, usually very, very low interest loan and avoid an overall actual

income tax event. The name of the game for these people is to never pay tax in the first place. And let's also be clear, it's no accident that the system is structured that way. Yeah, exactly. These people have paid to rig it so that it is structured this way. And the wealthier you are, the more likely you are to have influence on our political system.

So that's why it's an inverse relationship when you get to the top, where it's the more that you earn, the more loopholes you've been able to secure through our corrupt members of Congress to make sure that you pay next to nothing in taxes ultimately. I also think it's really interesting. They break down who are the top 400 income earners in the country and they break it down, I mean, specifically by names in a lot of cases, but also by like, how do they make their

money? Tech billionaires made up 10 of the top 15 incomes. Their income that they have to recognize with the IRS generally comes from selling stock. About a fifth of the top 400 earners were managers of hedge funds. That was the largest group out of the top 400 was hedge funds made up the largest group. Executives and founders of private equity firms also stood out. And then the other major category was heirs of large fortunes. Among the top 400, there are 11 heirs of Walmart founders, Sam and Bud Walton, and four of Amway founder, Richard DeVos. You may know Betsy DeVos. Might have heard of her before. I think people tend to have this idea of the wealthiest among us as like a Bezos or a Musk

who are making products and innovating and whatever. Obviously, you guys know I have issues with them as well. But in reality, most of these people either inherited their money from mom and dad or they're just engaged in financial wizardry and moving money around and not really creating anything and oftentimes actually creating a lot of misery among the American public. I want to focus on that, which is that I have way less with Elon Musk and Beef and Jeff Bezos, who created world transformational companies, which added trillions of dollars in wealth to the United States. I still think they should both pay more, but they are not the problem, in my opinion. The real problem are these executives and founders of private equity companies. Private equity adds

nothing to the US economy, literally nothing. They make money for themselves and for their already ultra high net worth clients. And what they point to in the ProPublica piece is that the private equity guys are paying the least taxes out of all of the top 400. Why? Because they use the carried interest loophole, which if we just close that, I think it would raise like $800 or $900 billion a year in tax because they're able to use carried interest, not treat it as regular income, treat it as interest income, and pay only 15% when they should owe 35% to 40% all the way up in a progressive taxation system. So the financiers are the people who have actually

fleeced the system more than anything. And they add nothing to the economy. It's worse. So they become ultra wealthy and then they pay even less. The other people who I have zero sympathy for in here are the heiresses, the heirs and the heiresses, the 11 members of the Walton family, the DeVos heirs that they point to. Amway is a total scam. Look at this. Disgusting. The 11 descendants in the top 400 saved $370 million a year due to a lower dividend tax rate. $370 million. I actually have a ton of respect for Sam Walton, the founder. You know who I don't have a ton of respect for? His grandson, who is just fleecing off of his stock. Look, it's a free country and hereditary wealth and all that.

I'm not saying it should be illegal, but it's ludicrous that you should be able to be saving this level of wealth when you did jack shit for the U.S. economy. Yeah, and that's the other thing that they rigged the system for is to make sure that there's basically no estate tax. So, you know, buy, borrow, die means you can pass everything forward to your heirs. Nobody ever pays any taxes on it. You end up with this, you know, truly sort of like hardened lines

of intergenerational wealth transfer, and it's not really a great thing for a democratic society. Just to put one more statistic in here to think about because they crunched the numbers on this. Each of the top 11 here averaged over a billion dollars in income annually from 2013 to 2018. And that doesn't even scratch the surface of what their overall wealth is. This is just the income that they had to recognize. The typical American would have to work for 25,000 years to make $1 billion.

And they made that much just in what they had to recognize every single year. Astonishing. And you wonder why Biden's pollster was telling them, like, why don't you lean into taxing the rich? Like, why are you, you know, why are you tiptoeing around actually telling people that these people should have to pay their taxes and have to pay rates comparable to what you, regular American citizen, are paying. But for some reason, they're still too scared of their own shadow to lean into that. 100%. A fun moment on the internet when Jack Dorsey, the former CEO of Twitter,

he's kind of coming into his own. He's no longer, he's unleashed, so to speak. He's a free man, yeah. He's weighing in on all kinds of stuff. And he's always been a very, you know, he's always been a very eclectic person. I guess he's just been had a leash around or a noose around his neck, be given the Twitter board and all of that. Well, this was a fun one. So CNN's Brian Stelter, let's put this up there on the screen. He says, Tucker Carlson is always selling the same thing, the Washington Post says. He's selling doubt. Some of that is true. But Jack replies, oh, and you all are selling hope? To which got 5,000 retweets, only 40,000 likes. And somebody replies, every single broadcast news channel is selling the same thing, ad viewership. And Jack

responds, yep. But what I especially love, Crystal, is that the author of the Washington Post piece got really upset with Jack for going after him. And he says that really what it is is that it's ludicrous for him to attack him and that it's basically his response, Philip Bump, to the Jack Dorsey kind of subtweet. It says, in this context, that is not the alternative. But I appreciate your sharing your thoughts, Jack. What does that even mean? In this context, that is not the alternative. But I appreciate your sharing your thoughts, Jack. What does that even mean? In this context? In this context? So you're being a critic, you're selling doubt,

and Jack goes, oh yeah, you guys are selling hope? And he's like, whoa, whoa, whoa, that's not the alternative to what we're just calling out, you know, something what we see. Right, which is fair, but he's responding directly to Brian Stelter. So that's why this is about CNN. This is about CNN, and this is about the fact that this entire system is bullshit. And it's all built on engagement to keep up a dying business, which is cable. I don't know why people can't own up to that.

And it also is why CNN and MSNBC critics of Fox, they'll never turn the mirror upon themselves. It's like, no, a pox on all your houses. You're all bad. We played that extremely weirdly awkward segment of Stelter with the Yale researcher. Oh, my God. Who, you know, what he did is he had paid Fox News viewers to watch CNN. Yes. And then evaluated how their opinions shifted. And of course, CNN loved to seize on this

to basically look and be like, look, Fox's viewers are being lied to and their brains are being washed. True. Totally true. But what they didn't want to talk about was the other part of the study that said that also CNN is engaged in a lot of the same sort of partisan filtering tactics where they just show you things that are convenient to their team and whatever narrative they ultimately want to push. And so Stelter had this Yale researcher on to break down the data and was faced with the uncomfortable moment of the researcher telling him to his face like, you know you guys do this too by the way, right? And Stelter gets all flustered. He's like, that feels like whataboutism. And it's like, what do you mean?

Why does he shit like that? It's so weird. But yeah, that's right. He leans in like this. Anyway, the fact of the matter is, look, they have the same business model. It is true, like Fox was built directly as a political project. CNN and MSNBC were just built as money-making ventures.

So there is sort of like something different at their DNA. We could certainly debate, you know, who goes further, which is more damaging, which is worse, et cetera, et cetera. But ultimately the model is basically the same. The person was like, it's all about, you know, making people hate each other and like stick around for ad dollars. That's really it. The programming is not the actual product

that CNN is selling. These are all ways to just get you to stick around for the next commercial break. That's it. And so anyone who doesn't recognize the water that they themselves are swimming in, you know, is not going to be, their commentary is not going to be particularly useful, I guess I would say. I am sure that you are aware that tax day has just

come and gone. And there is a story that is very important and very relevant to your lives that we wanted to talk about here, which is the way that you are being screwed over by TurboTax and by H&R Block and these other tax filers and also by a corrupt federal government. All right, so let's talk about all of this. Let's put Tarek Thompson's piece up on the screen here first. He wrote this a couple years back, but it is still very much the case. He says the 10-second tax return, letting the government do its citizens' taxes is cheap, efficient, and accurate. Naturally, the United States won't do it. We take it as a given in this country that tax preparation and tax filing has to be a complete and utter nightmare. Annoying,

time-consuming, stressful, anxiety-inducing, often expensive. None of that actually has to be the case. In fact, in other countries, if you are a wage earner, like the overwhelming majority of Americans are, the government already has your information. Employers are required to submit what your wages are and what you've learned. So in Sweden, for example, the vast majority, he writes, of taxpayers don't do battle with tax documents and fine print question about itemized deductions. They literally get a document from the government with everything already filled out, and all they have to do is respond yes to that document, and it's done. It literally takes like five seconds. So you might ask yourself, well, why haven't we done this in our country, Sagar? Tell me. And as always, follow the money. The bottom line is, and I'll get into the specifics here, that these tax prep companies,

H&R Block, Intuit, TurboTax, they make big bank on forcing you to go through this incredibly painful process. And so it was a live issue a while back, back in 2003, to actually move in the direction of Sweden and other nations of the world and have the government have an easy-file solution where things are filled out for you, it's simple, it's straightforward, and the overwhelming majority of taxpayers could have their taxes done like this. But guess what? That would hurt those companies and it would take away their cash cow. So they lobbied the government, they funneled all kinds of money, mostly to Republican legislators. And so what they got written into law instead is, rather than the government coming up with their own free and easy-to-file solution,

where the end goal is just to make things simple for people, and for the government, by the way, would then collect a lot more taxes than they do now, too. Instead, they entered into this corrupt partnership with those companies and said, you all are going to participate in this free file system. You're going to create the product that people are going to use. Well, you can guess what happened next. Yes, those companies technically created those systems. They buried them, made them impossible to find, so consumers couldn't find them. They made them intentionally difficult to use. This all, by the way, was the subject of a great investigation

and legal action against these companies. Made them intentionally difficult to use so that people couldn't figure out how it was done to incentivize them to move into the paid products. And then even worse than that, they would sort of funnel people into paying for this without people even realizing that they were being funneled into the paid product.

So perfect story of a good idea, which becomes completely corrupted, this without people even realizing that they were being funneled into the paid product. So, perfect story of a good idea, which becomes completely corrupted and captured, and these companies are bilking the American taxpayer for millions of dollars. The latest development here with this tax season is Elizabeth Warren and a number of other legislators actually wrote a letter to the makers of TurboTax calling them out. Let's go ahead and throw this piece up on the screen. They say this part that they're focused on now is that in addition to all of this, TurboTax has now hired all of these former government officials to lobby an influence pedal in Washington. And so they're demanding answers about exactly who all

they have hired and what they are doing to try to influence their government. One of the people she calls out is apparently they hire paid and undisclosed sum to John Friedman, a former member of President Obama's National Economic Council to influence pedal in Washington. So it really is a disgusting story of corruption and something that should be easy and simple and painless being made like excruciating for American taxpayers every year. Go ahead and put Helene Olan's piece up on the screen because she points to the same things. We spend hours and hours preparing our taxes. We just shouldn't have to do that. And look, Crystal,

you and I are a small business. We have had to spend tens of thousands of dollars in order to prepare our business taxes because we make money on the internet across different states because of a Supreme Court ruling, as well as we talked previously about storing our merchandise. I want people to know this. In terms of, is it easy? No, it's actually not. You literally have to hire somebody in order to figure out this complex tax code. And it's all like a guessing game of estimating income by different states. And it's nuts. I mean, you know, we're spending time, energy, and effort on taxes when we should be on content, on hiring more people and adding value. I mean, this is a boomer libertarian argument, but it's not when you look at, like, I mean, look at who is involved. It's Katie Porter and Elizabeth Warren who's pushing this because basically what they're saying is, look, they're not saying people shouldn't pay taxes or the tax rates should be eliminated or anything like that.

We are happy to pay our taxes. billion dollar tax preparation industry. And for the overwhelming majority of Americans, like 70% of Americans that are wage earners, this could be so simple and painless. And instead, because of this corrupt bargain that has been made, it is painful every single year for no reason. So we wanted to remind you that your legislators and your elected leaders and in combination with these corrupt corporate ghouls are making things painful for you every year and they don't have to. It didn't have to be this way. The folks over at Fox News is the five decided to tackle the debate over a shorter four day work week. Sure is well reasoned. Somewhat hilarious results. Let's take a listen to what they had to say. Democrats in California are trying to cancel hard work. Here's their idea. State reps are proposing a four-day work week for companies with more than 500 employees. That's right. They're proposing shortening your office work week from 40 hours to just 32 hours. But get this part,

your salary stays the same. So it's 32 hours of work for 40 hours of pay. And if you want to work more than 32 hours, you have to get paid time and a half for overtime. And remember, this is happening in the midst of an alarming labor shortage in America. Employers cannot find workers. There's somewhere around 10 million jobs unfilled in this country right now. Are they lazy, this generation, Judge? Is that what it is? Or have they figured out life is short? We've been taught to work so hard, you waste your whole life working. You could be taking it easy and get overtime. It's destroying my social life. And that's when it starts hurting me, I care. But you know what

I think they realize? They realize in a 40-hour week, maybe at most you work 32 hours. Right. The thing is, there is a lot of inefficiency built in the workplace, including even coming and going to work. I never understood a lunch hour. But then again, I don't have kids. I don't need to run to do errands. So I just sit around and I always have my assistant know, my assistant, I pull a Jesse and have my assistant do everything.

But you know what? This is going to be, this is going to end up turning us into a virtual reality cocoon. Everybody's just going to evolve into staying home. They're going to get everything they need at their house. They're going to get really large. And the only people that are going to be in the outside world are the people who can't afford the inside world. We can't help California. They have to help themselves. They got a lot of delegates. Are we Dana like France?

They do have, but not ours. It's funny that you say that. I wrote France right here on my paper because if you want to be more like France, eat more croissants. Don't go this route. The other thing is they did in France. If you look at their economy, they're terrible. But also for a while they were like, well, we don't really want to put our defense money into NATO because it's like we want to spend money on it. We don't have enough. OK, I'm not trying to do a French accent. You're not allowed. Yes, you are. The employer is not allowed to contact you on the weekend. It is illegal for an email to be sent to you on the weekend in France, for example. And here's the other thing.

If a company thinks that they can attract more talent by saying, you're going to work 32 hours a week at this salary, great. But the government shouldn't tell people to do that. So they hit a lot of highlights there. That was, wow. Yeah. I like when she brings up NATO just randomly. Like, wait, what? So first of all, the framing is like, this is just about workers being lazy.

And they try to frame it in this, like, populist way. And then it devolves into Greg Gutfeld talking about, like, his assistant and how this is gonna hurt him personally and his social life. Look, Gutfeld, you work at five o'clock and at 11 o'clock. Dude, you're probably chilling, like most people in media, all day.

You get to run your errands and do basically whatever you want and show up to the office at, like, two to three o'clock. Dude, you're probably chilling like most people in media all day. You get to run your errands and do basically whatever you want and show up to the office at like 2 to 3 o'clock. Have all your meals catered. You get paid a fat salary and you don't actually

have to deal with any of the vagaries of normal everyday life. I'm not saying that I necessarily do that either. I'm not like, oh, these people

are just so lazy and California can't help themselves. We live a good life. That's cool. Here's the other thing. I liked the setup, too, from Geraldo, who was trying to do it in this almost like scaremongering voice of like, you're only going to work 32 hours, but you're going to get paid the same thing. Isn't that terrible? Of course, what they never bring up is any of the actual research and statistics around this, which shows that, you know, when they've tried four-day work weeks in other parts of the world, productivity actually increased.

Businesses saved on cost. Workers had more work-life balance. And productivity actually went up because the only person who made a decent point there gut-fell about how, like, yeah, really, when you're working the 40-hour week, are you really working 40 hours? Or are you, you know? That's actually true. That's actually true. And so when people have a more limited time,

they know like, I have this much time, I gotta get it done. Their productivity goes up. They get the same amount of work done in a lesser time. And I think we saw that during the pandemic too, when people had more flexibility and there wasn't as much, and they were, you know,

white collar workers were working from home. There wasn't enough like, let's have a coffee and bullshit it was more just like let me get the work done and then let me actually live my life well i think the other problem is this isn't entirely a white collar phenomenon you know work factory workers don't work they don't have the luxury of work from home like you know like yes we'd be much better off right focusing on actual conditions that most working class folks at grocery stores, factories, working as a cashier or something, this is not an issue to their day-to-day life. Well, but— That's what we really should focus on. The legal—what is legally considered a full-time work week matters a lot for working class people.

Oh, yeah, right. Because of benefits. The union movement is what set the standard at 40 hours. And so, yeah, if you change it to 32, that means anything that you're having to work above and beyond that, you're required to get time and a half. So it matters a lot, actually, for working class people, more so even than office workers who are salaried and who, you know, if you're working in a job where you've got to, like, track your time for clients or whatever, that's one thing. But most office workers, you know, they're either putting in already less than 40 hours or they're putting in way more than that because they have a totally insane out of whack work-life balance. I also happen to love the law in France that they were freaking out about that says basically like, there is a work time and there is also life outside of work. I think that having as Americans, like one of the things that we actually sort of tiptoed into

during the pandemic was the understanding that there are things outside of the workspace that matter and that people are valuing things like family time and living in a more sort of like affordable and comfortable environment and having that kind of balance between what they're doing in the office and what the rest of life actually looks like. Yeah. Hi, I'm Maximilian Alvarez.

I'm the editor in chief of the Real News Network and host of the podcast Working People. And I couldn't be more excited to be teaming up with the Breaking Points crew to bring you all the latest updates on worker struggles and the labor movement, and to provide what I hope will be information and analysis that you can use to take back power in your workplace and beyond. This is the art of class war. Today I want to talk to you about one of the greatest weapons the ruling class has in its arsenal, a weapon it has always known how to effectively use to keep working people down, time. At the most fundamental level, working for a wage, working to survive, means trading your labor and your time to another for compensation. That is time out of your day,

out of your week, out of your life that is specifically reserved for work, where the average person spends at least a third of their lives. That is also time that is surrendered to the control of someone else, someone or some entity or some algorithm that determines what your work schedule is, how much that schedule changes and how much advance notice you get about said changes, what you do during that time on the clock, the pace at which you do it, the length of your workday, when your breaks and days off are, and even the age at which you get to retire, if you ever get to retire. Amazon workers are surveilled to Orwellian extents,

getting docked for, quote, time off task, some resorting to pissing in bottles so as not to fall behind delivery quotas. Truck drivers, train conductors, and flight attendants pump their bodies full of caffeine or whatever works to keep them awake on long haul trips. Gig companies tout the rates workers earn on the job while conveniently omitting uncompensated time spent driving between orders.

Understaffed hospital workers have to serve more patients with less support, staying as late as needed to properly log every single bit of information about patients, tests, cross-department communications, and routine tasks in their internal computer systems. Teachers with packed class loads struggle to find time, often uncompensated time, for sufficient prep. Retail and service workers can hardly plan their lives outside of work or get other jobs when their shifts change sporadically week to week, while many are deliberately underscheduled as a cost-saving measure or a disciplinary measure, or both.

Last year, many of the strikes and other labor actions we saw involved workers at jobs that during the COVID-19 pandemic experienced record demand, record profits, record increases in revenues or endowments from Kellogg's, Frito-Lay, Nabisco, and Smithfield Port Processing to Heaven's Hill Distillery, John Donair Desserts, St. Vincent Hospital, John Deere, and even Columbia University. At many of these jobs, workers reported being pushed into forced overtime to meet the increased demand, getting less time with their families, less time to rest, less time to heal, while bosses, executives, and shareholders were practically

swimming in pools of money like Scrooge McDuck. In so many ways, labor struggle is the struggle for time. Along with our bodies, it is the most precious and finite resource we have to offer. This is why, as historians frequently point out, the fight over the workday is perhaps the most common denominator connecting the different strands and iterations of the labor movement. This is why we rightly celebrate things like the weekend and paid leave as worker-won victories. This is why we still remember the refrain, eight hours for work, eight hours for rest, eight hours for what we will, even though the merciless, insatiable drive of modern capitalism has made it increasingly impossible for working people today to realize that centuries-old dream. Workers know the value of their time. That is why so many continue to fight for it. And that is why this fight has brought and will keep bringing divided segments of the working class together. One particular example that has been unforgivably ignored or barely covered by corporate and right-wing media,

but that has thankfully been featured on breaking points many times, along with outlets like The Real News, Labor Notes, and the Valley Labor Report, is the Warrior Met Coal strike. As of April 1st, 1,100 striking union mine workers and their families in Alabama have been on strike for over a year, holding the line under great duress, great financial strain, violence from scabs on the picket line, and business-friendly courts stripping their federally protected rights to picket. Again, if we're talking about time, think about how long a year actually is. This time last year, all eyes were on the first Amazon union vote in Bessemer, Alabama. A coup had just taken

place in Myanmar, and Joe Biden was two months into his presidential term. The Warrior Met coal strike is already one of the longest in the country's history, and is suspected to be the longest strike in Alabama's history. And every single day has been a struggle. To mark the one-year anniversary of the day the Warrior Met strike began, the United Mine Workers of America held a rally earlier this month in Tannehill State Park. For the real news, the brilliant journalist Kim Kelly, who has hands down covered this strike more consistently and with more compassion and dedication than anyone else in the country, went to the rally to talk to workers about their year of struggle and why they won't back down.

Here's a bit of Kim's interview with Greg Pilkerton, a mine worker who has been injured by company goons on the picket line, who talks about his fight. I have to really look around and see what's going on because I'm a coal miner. I'm not set up to be the Amazon worker or the Walmart worker. It takes them people to do their job and it takes me to do mine. So if it's not over this time next year and we do an interview, I'll still be standing here. Be here to be a little longer. But. I'm still here. That's what's important.

Thank you all. Thanks for everybody that's done everything that they've done. It means a ton. I can't not honor my dad's legacy and the UMWA's legacy and my family's legacy and the rest of my co-workers' legacies. Too much has been given and it's been fought too hard for. So we ain't going nowhere. This time last year, when the strike began, workers repeatedly stressed that time was one of the most central issues in their fight against the company. After the previous contract was forced on the union because the previous owner of the mine went bankrupt,

workers reported not only drastic changes to their pay and benefits, but to their schedules. Along with the additional hours spent just getting to the job site, driving out to the mines in the middle of nowhere and descending deep into the earth, workers described being required to work six days a week with their one day off never really being predictable. Sometimes it was a Tuesday, sometimes it was a Friday, and for many, seven days a week was the norm. They also described a draconian four-strike attendance policy leading workers to get fired or risk termination for any excused or unexcused absence, including visiting a spouse in the hospital.

As coal miners' wives also described to Kim Kelly at The Real News, many of them have gotten used to having, quote, absentee spouses since the new schedules changed. Unable to meaningfully live and plan their lives outside of their grueling work, miners felt deep in their bones how every day spent thousands of feet underground is a day lost as their children grow and their parents age above ground. What I have heard over and over again from Warrior Met co-workers is as heartbreaking as it is simple. Quote, we just want to see our families, end quote. The UMWA motto, which has become something of a mantra for strikers, is one day longer, one day stronger. Meaning, however long the company holds out, workers keep saying that they just need to hold out one day stronger. Meaning, however long the company holds out, workers keep saying that

they just need to hold out one day more. This strike embodies one of labor's most enduring and defining struggles, the struggle to control our own time. The fight over the working day and who gets to control the majority of a worker's life has been perhaps the most consistent and common driver of the labor movement and has been a strong unifying force bringing people from different jobs, sectors, trades, races, genders, and all other walks of life together. As Philip Foner and David Roediger write in their book, Our Own Time, A History of American Labor in the Working Day, contrary to the varied fights by different trades and different types of workers for better wages

and working conditions, quote, the reduction of working hours constituted the prime demand in the class conflicts that spawned America's first industrial strike, its first citywide trade union councils, its first labor party, its first general strikes, its first organizing uniting skilled and unskilled workers, its first strike by females, and its first attempts at regional and national labor organization. Reduction of hours became an explosive demand partly because of its unique capacity to unify workers across the lines of craft, race, sex, skill, age, and ethnicity, end quote. So what is different now is these age-old struggles are still happening, but they are happening in a techno-dystopian 21st century

in which the mechanisms for tracking, surveilling, and controlling our time are more sophisticated than ever. They are also happening in a hyper-mediated environment in which we have all been conditioned to have the long-term memories of goldfish. That's what makes us such loyal participants in a digital ecosystem where we become eager data producers for an attention-based economy that needs us clicking and staring at our screens as much as possible. But that bleeds over into other parts of our brains and our hearts, too. It eats away at our capacity for long-term commitments. It makes it harder for us

to sustain our attention and our solidarity and our compassion for struggles that take time, like the warrior met coal strike. In this way, the attention economy is a labor issue, because if we continue being the kind of people corporate captured technology makes of us, if we allow it to erode our capacity for commitment without putting up a fight, we will lose. Because difficult campaigns will require years-long battles to make an impact. We have to be in it for the long haul. Commitment, as writer Pete Davis would say in his book Dedicated, is the thing we most need if we're going to start fixing this broken world. And here's the thing, workers fighting for the respect and dignity and treatment and compensation and safety that they deserve is part of that fixing. It's a big damn part that requires sustained commitments.

Because once we start going Uma Thurman and we start wiggling that big toe, once working people start building power, and as Sarah Nelson says, once workers start taking hold of the power they already have, once we stop fighting each other and start fighting for each other, once we come together in the struggle to make life better for once, that power grows. From the shop floor to the state house, working people's power to shape the world grows when we are in the struggle together. If we want to be part of that change, if we want to be a part of the labor movement, and if we want to be part of that change, if we want to be a part of the labor movement, and if we want to help grow the movement for working people to have more power in this world, then we have to stay committed to these struggles.

And this is exactly what the bosses and the ruling class in general desperately want to prevent. This is why they use time as a weapon. This is why the go-to strategy for Warrior Met Coal and its Wall Street investors is to wait the strikers out, regardless of how much money they lose in the process. They have seen time and again how effective that strategy can be, especially in the 21st century, and not just in the realm of labor politics. And I'll just give one example. In August of 2019, Democrats around the country were on every major news network calling for then Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to push through a Senate vote on

H.R. 8, a bill that had passed the House with bipartisan support in February of that year, which would require universal background checks for all firearm sales in the country. Now, the increased pressure from Democrats at the time, which was itself a response to increased pressure from scared and pissed off constituents, came in the wake of two mass shootings that occurred within one day of each other. In the first, Patrick Wood Crucias, a white supremacist terrorist, went on a shooting spree at a Walmart super center in El Paso, Texas, killing 23 people and injuring dozens more. Then, the very next day, Conor Betts shot

and killed nine people and wounded 17 others in Dayton, Ohio. At that point in 2019, the U.S. chamber of the Senate was in its August recess. In the days and weeks after the Dayton and El Paso shootings, congressional Democrats breathlessly called for McConnell to recall the chamber and put H.R. 8 to a vote. He didn't. Then another deadly shooting took place in the West Texas cities of Midland and Odessa on August 29th, and pressures continued to mount. McConnell said that he would only bring H.R. 8 to a vote if then-President Trump supported it. He didn't. The bill became another rotting legislative corpse on McConnell's desk. At the time, Don Beyer, Democratic representative for Virginia's 8th Congressional District,

actually summed things up quite pointedly. Quote, Mitch McConnell isn't doing anything about it. That isn't because he doesn't know about the problem or how to solve it. We know precisely why Mitch McConnell isn't here. He is waiting for the outrage to die down, for the headlines to change, and people to turn the page and go on. It's what he always does, end quote. Now, I want to be very clear that this is not a segment about Mitch McConnell and the Republicans, nor is it about Democrats and the endless debate about gun control and mass shootings in America. I'm bringing up McConnell because he is probably the

most recognizable practitioner of the ruling class serving weaponization of time. He can sit there and take the hits and just wait us out, and it just keeps working. But the point here is that this tactic is a staple for employers and shareholders looking to break strikes, wear down unionization efforts, and demoralize workers. And you can find other examples all over the place. Kellogg's tried to sweat out 1,400 striking workers using the looming holidays and the cold weather as an additional demoralizing agent. Tenet Healthcare, the company that owns St. Vincent Hospital in Worcester, Massachusetts, tried to starve out its striking nurses for almost a year. And Warrior Met Coal is doing the exact same thing to the striking miners.

They are banking on us forgetting about them. They are banking on our attention waning and our outrage dissipating. Don't prove them right. Don't let them win. What I'm saying is we all have a role to play here, but it's going to take work. It's going to take fighting against the forces that turn time against us and that in turn lead us to turn away from each other. We can't just keep excitedly jumping from strike to strike to unionization to unionization. Supporting all facets of this movement is essential. Sharing the news is important, but we also have to commit. We have

to see them through. We have to be there when it counts, not just when it's trending online. I don't care if it's raising money or just bringing coffee to a picket line. Imagine you're a striking coal miner on the empty back roads outside Warrior Met Coal in Alabama. Every single sign that you are not alone in this, that other working people are with you, is enough to keep you going one day longer, one day stronger. No one has to do everything here, but everyone can do something, even if it's just continuing to demand justice for the railroad workers who are suffering under their own abusive working and scheduling conditions and who had their strike blocked by the company and the courts, as was covered before on Breaking Points. And even if

it's just making sure that we never forget names like Evan Seyfried, Jennifer Bates, Daryl Richardson, Christian Smalls, Angelica Maldonado, Marie Cruz Mesa and Carmen Anguiano, Amanda and Jeff Frankel, Beto Sanchez and Nebretta Harden, Hayden and Braxton Wright, and so, so many more. This isn't just about us being excited that workers are rising up, asserting their humanity, and demanding what they deserve. This is about us helping one another climb out of the pit that we've been put into by those in power. The labor movement has to be in it to win, because that is damn sure what the other side is trying to do with much deeper pockets and control over powerful institutions

that they can use at their disposal. If we are going to win, it is up to us to carry on labor's enduring fight and to take up each other's fights as our own. We have to fight for our time and we have to fight against the way that time is being weaponized against us. And we have to do it now, because as is always the case for every single one of us, time is running out. The days that we are here are not just

abstract units of time passing by. They are precious moments of being on this earth during the one life that we get. Use them well. Thank you for watching my debut segment with Breaking Points, and be sure to subscribe to my news outlet, The Real News Network, with links in the description. See you soon for the next edition of The Art of Class War. Solidarity forever. This is an iHeart Podcast.