Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - Mini Show #39: Inflation, AOC, Amazon Exec Resigns, Kushner Investigation, Manager Retaliation, New Culture Wars, & More!

Episode Date: June 11, 2022

Krystal and Saagar and their collaborators talk about inflation, New York Times, AOC demands, Amazon exec resigning, Kushner's Saudi ties, new culture war, medicare prices, retaliation against workers, & 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/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an iHeart Podcast. worthy mainstream by becoming a Breaking Points premium member today at BreakingPoints.com. Your hard-earned money is going to help us build 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. All right, everybody, it is a bit of a banner day here at Breaking Points because we have live in studio a member of Congress, Congressman Ro Khanna. Welcome back to the show. Great to see you, sir. I'm honored to be back on. I'm honored to see how this happens. It's a pretty cool set. Yeah, being on set here. A lot of character. Don't give away too many of the secrets. The trade secrets. That's right. Yeah. So you had an op-ed that caught both of our attention. Let's

go ahead and put this up on the screen. This was in the New York Times. Carson Khanna taking aim at Joe Biden's inflation policies. The headline here is, there is way more Biden can do to lower prices. And you don't just criticize, you have some specific ideas here that the government could enact and that the government is basically the only actor who could take charge and have some impact both on gas prices and food prices. Just lay out the case that you're making here, Congressman. Well, first of all, at a high level, we need an all-out mobilization, not just ad hoc initiatives that are reactive to headlines. Here's what I say on gas prices. The government could actually buy up oil at a reasonably cheap price and then sell it back. Now, oil's at, let's say, 115 bucks. People say, well, what if it goes down

to 105? I don't think it's going to go down, but fine. The government takes a loss over the next three months. It's much less of a loss than what we're giving Ukraine. On the flip side, you could actually prevent gas from going to six bucks. So here, now I'm not saying do this all the time, but in an emergency, do this. You could do the same thing with fuel prices. Those are food prices. Those are two concrete suggestions.

Right, and this is, you know, this isn't price fixing. This is actually straight up within the executive authority. I mean, look, Congressman, here's the question. We've talked about this for months here. We've talked about that SBR. We've talked about the meatpacking industry, agriculture, the executive action. We see today, I'm talking about solar tariffs. And yet, we don't see that executive action whenever it comes to the basic bread and butter. So,

you have more visibility far than us. Why is the administration not doing any of these things? Sagar, I think that there's this concern that you're intervening with the market and what precedent are you setting. But the reality is people don't want solutions that are a year out or two years out. They want to know how are you going to lower the price of gas? How are you going to lower the price of food? And we have a mechanism actually for doing that in cases of emergency. We're a huge purchaser. We can purchase this stuff and sell it back at a cheap price. I mean, well, commodity traders do it, but they do it at a profit. Yeah, they do it the other way. And so the government can do it. So at least acknowledge the government can do it. Now you

can say, we aren't going to do it, but here's what you can't say. Well, I'll leave it to the Fed. You know, the government, the president's the most powerful person in the world. They want to see the president and the administration act. Anyone can get elected and say, okay, I want the independence of the Fed. Okay, fine. It's different than Trump. But you don't get elected to say, I'm going to respect the independence of agencies. You get elected to solve problems. Right. No, I think that's well said. I mean, it's not every day that a critique from a member of Congress from the left is published in the pages of the New York Times. What did the White House have to say about this? Did they reach out to you? Have you seen any receptivity to the ideas? They did. They were

polite. I got to talk to everyone and they said, oh, innovative ideas. But I don't care whether I don't need a compliment. You're not looking for a pat on the back. I want them to act. And at the very least, direct your agencies. Look, direct the Commodity Future Trading Commission to do an analysis. They could do it in one week on what the impact would be of having the government intervene by having purchases in food or fuel markets. And then, you know, the surprising thing is in the Congress, I've had frontliners, moderates actually, come up to me and say, you know, you're right, we've got to do something. I don't agree with all the ideas. 50% I agree with, but you're absolutely right that we have to acknowledge the pain and we have to do something bolder. So you have this odd alliance that the progressives

agree with me. Weird horseshoe going on there. Yeah. Frontliners. That's fine as long as something gets done. I mean, I think my question is, you probably see this, your district, what's gas in your district? 650, something like that. Where are you from? That's nuts. I district, what's gas in your district? $6.50, something like that. $6 when I was there. Where you're from. That's nuts. I mean, here in D.C., the national average, we're all closing on $5 a gallon. I don't understand why there aren't more Democratic members of Congress who are willing to come out and say there is something that needs to be done. Is there a reluctance amongst your colleagues in order to criticize the administration on this front?

Because we just very rarely see dissent. That's why you're here. We very rarely see dissent and even willingness to engage in dissent in good faith. Sure. I mean, there's always a reluctance to criticize the president of your own party. You want to be in good standing with the president of your own party. But here, I think that my criticism was one with ideas. I wasn't just saying, OK, you're not doing enough. I was saying, here are things you could do. And I fundamentally think it will be a disaster in November if we aren't seeing every day between now and November saying we're going to do these

things to lower prices now. Look, I've been the biggest proponent on renewable energy and renewable energy spending. That's not going to do stuff in August or September at the pump. Yeah. Speak a little bit more to that in terms of the political landscape. There are some competing analyses, I would say, about why President Biden's approval rating has fallen so far. The age demographic with which he's seen the greatest declines in terms of his approval rating is young people. I mean, at the beginning of the administration, young people were the most enthusiastic about Biden. Now he has his lowest ratings with young people. What do you think has happened?

What are the failures that have led to this place? What are the American people feeling that has led them to conclude, like, this is not getting it done for us? Well, one, I'll give him some benefit of the doubt in that he's genuinely had a tough hand. I mean, when you have a pandemic, when you have inflation, that's tough for any president. And so to have high approval numbers would be hard. But here's where I would say he could do more. He could be more bold. He could be more energetic. He could be more imaginative. He could be more out of the box. And he could look like he's fighting every day and decisive on some issues. I mean, there's no reason we shouldn't have forgiven the student debt.

There's no reason that we couldn't have been out there and have gotten some deal on climate by now. There's no reason why every day he shouldn't be pushing and fighting on reducing prices. So I just think there needs to be more energy, decisiveness, creativity out of the administration. I'm not saying that's going to get you up to 50%, but I think that's what people want to see. One other thing I had, a question I had for you as someone who does care a lot about the climate crisis, as I do as well. What do you think that the landscape looks like now in terms of climate action? Because you have, first of all, gas, extremely expensive. And you have, of course, the war in Ukraine and the fact that we've cut off access to Russian oil. And so there's this desire to, okay, well,

let's get Saudi to pump more. Let's maybe do a deal with Venezuela, which I'm totally open to. Let's try to get the Iranians back in the system as well. But what does all of that mean in terms of the medium to longer term prospects of moving off of fossil fuel? I think medium to longer term is right. I think what we can't say is, here's our climate plan, and that's going to lower your gas prices tomorrow, because people say, come on, tell us the truth. So we should have a short term plan on gas prices. Then we should say, look, long term for price stability, long term to defeat Russia, Venezuela, Iran, Saudi Arabia, we need to have an alternative. If you want the oil to be worth less,

their countries to have less value, then you need to have an alternative. And so a moonshot in renewable energy is in our national security. It's there for long-term price stability. And I think people would get that. Where they get upset is when you have someone saying, well, they'll get an electric vehicle,

and they're like, come on, 3% or something of people have electric vehicles and I'm paying too much at the pump. By the way, you can't get them because of the chip issue. I was going to say, you can't even buy it if you wanted to. Well, it's the chip issue. It's the fact that we're not mining enough lithium or cobalt. We're not processing that here. We're totally dependent on China and Australia in terms of that production. That's, by the way, one thing that I think could bring this country together in terms of where we have common ground. Bring production back to this country. Have processing of critical materials in this country.

I mean, yeah, but then how does the solar tariff exclusion go through when clearly someone in the administration is listening to somebody, right? Because you have an executive action that goes through an extraordinary action. I mean, some people called it illegal, basically circumventing a congressional law that was passed. How does that go through and not a single one of these things goes through? I mean, the baby formula one that you point to is extraordinary. It took, I mean, the administration admitted they've known about this since April. So why did it take until the end of May? I just feel a tremendous sense of malaise.

And yet some action on some issues, which I think are extraordinarily detrimental to production. Can you square us that? How does it work in the White House? Because you're going to talk to them any more than, especially our audience. A lot of people ask that question. Well, we disagree on the solar part and I think they had to do that and they combined it with the defense production, but I just want to be, but the defense production should be fully funded. And even the baby formula, they could be doing a lot more. Look, they're they're flying things to planes to transport the baby formula. But if you notice, they're not actually buying the baby formula. They could actually buy the baby formula. They could tell the FDA if it's safe enough for European babies, it's safe enough for American babies. They haven't done that. So I think that this is my critique of the administration. I'll probably get calls after this. And that is that there's too much caution. They're not willing to think fully out of the box enough in a crisis. Look, Herbert Hoover had a lot of the ideas that FDR actually took. FDR just came and said, we're going to do it 10 times bigger and we're going to try stuff. And I don't care if it fails, We'll try something else. And I think in a crisis, you need that approach. And that's what I've

been pushing them for. Yeah. Maybe it doesn't matter, but I'm curious. Do you think that that cautiousness comes from an ideological predisposition? I mean, Biden throughout his very long career in Washington has always tried to locate himself in the center of whatever the Democratic Party, you know, spectrum is? Or do you think it comes from a fear of, oh, if we do too much with the government, that's going to give the Republicans a talking point. So like sort of a political fear calculus versus an actual ideological reluctance to use the powers of the federal government. I think it comes from an ideological bias of neoliberalism. And I throw that word out, meaning that there's just been this view

that let markets do their thing and don't interfere. And it means don't interfere when it comes to production. I disagree. The government ought to be helping make sure we have plants and production here in partnership with the private sector. And it says, let the prices go up and down. The government shouldn't get in the business of buying. I have never met a constituent in my district who says, I am concerned whether the government's going to do too much or too little on prices. You know what they say? Bring the prices

down. And so I agree we shouldn't have price controls, but we are so reluctant to have the government play a decisive role. And that's, I think, what makes people cautious. There are a lot of economists, friends of mine, who called me up and disagreed with this piece. One person said, who liked my book, said, this isn't one of your better works. So, you know, and my guess is there are 100 of those folks who have the president's ear. So here's the point, though.

The president had the guts to overrule the generals in Afghanistan. I supported the president. I think that was a courageous decision. I am not Monday morning quarterback. Could it have been done slightly better? Sure, but anyone can say that. That was gutsy. Well, does he have the guts to overrule the conventional economists?

Actually, that's harder almost than the generals. But that's what we need in this country. Someone who's going to be decisive on government intervention where it comes to helping the working and middle class. Yeah. Well, it's harder because, as you pointed out, he has an ideological predisposition to not do that. Whereas on Afghanistan, I mean, his foreign policy is a real mixed bag over the course of his career. But he had some of the right instincts even under the Obama administration. It's really helpful to get some insight from you as to how these debates are unfolding.

Also very interesting that there's this sort of weird horseshoe between the like centrists who are facing re-election doom and progressives who were saying, come on, let's get this thing together. So really appreciate you taking the time to stop by. Thank you. Thank you, sir. Thank you.

Appreciate it very much. Another show. Thank you. President Biden, an open war of words with Elon Musk after Elon Musk said he's going to be cutting some jobs over at Tesla. Let's take a listen to what Biden had to say in reaction. What do you say to Elon Musk about his feeling about the economy? Jamie Dimon has said similar things. Well, let me tell you, while Elon Musk is talking about that, Ford is increasing their investment overwhelmingly. I think Ford is increasing their investment overwhelmingly.

I think Ford is increasing investment in building new electric vehicles, 6,000 new employees, union employees, I might add, in the Midwest. The former Chrysler Corporation, Stellantis, they are also making similar investments in electric vehicles. Intel is adding 20,000 new jobs for making computer chips. So, you know, lots of luck on this trip to the moon. I mean, I don't, I mean. Okay, first of all, it's Mars. I don't know, though. I enjoyed the shade personally.

I'm curious what you think because, honestly, I mean, Elon's prognosis, let's put this up there on the screen. He said he's going to cut 10% of its salaried workforce over concerns about the global economy following a hiring spree. That seems entirely reasonable. I mean, given the fact that we see what the macroeconomic outlook is, I actually just looked at some survey data. Majority of Americans believe that they are living in a recession right now, including both Democrats and Republicans. So even with the partisan split, most people feel as if they are living already in a recession, which is obviously going to have a massive impact on consumer spending. And we already see consumer spending going down in Target and Gap and Walmart. I mean, EVs are the definition of a luxury good. So it makes sense that you would

see a decline in sales there too. This really smacks of poor management though, because they hired, they increased their headcount by 45% in one year. Because they had a boom during the pandemic. And we know also, I mean, electric vehicle demand, we covered how it continues to go up. It's up by 300%. So it makes a lot more sense to me is, you know, Ford and Chrysler and these other companies that are adding capacity. And so it seems like he went on like a wild hiring spree and now turned around and like cut all those employees loose, which I also would say, couple this with that memo that he sent out that was aggressively like, get your asses back in the office. These are all good reasons why you should have a union,

why there should be worker representation and it shouldn't all be subject to the whims of one billionaire and his quote unquote gut feeling about the economy here. So I was here for Biden's comments. I enjoyed it. He got it wrong.

At least say it's good with Mars. That's whatever. It doesn't actually matter. It doesn't matter. My point being, I do think though that Biden's kind of defensiveness on this, I mean, he needs a better answer because it's not, he's not wrong that people, those car companies aren't investing in EVs, but I'd be certain that

they're cutting their sales projections. I mean, there's no way that anybody who relies on consumer spending, especially even in the EV marketplace, I mean, these are expensive cars. Most people cannot afford these cars. And even with the $4,500 tax credit that exists in place, you're still looking at, what, a $50-something thousand investment minimum. On the other hand, though, you have gas prices that are through the roof. So that inherently makes it so that it's going to increase the market and massive incentive for people to go in the direction of electric vehicles. And also people who are at that end of the spectrum who are looking at electric vehicles are going to be the ones that are doing okay. You know what I'd bet on? Plug-in hybrids. I think that's going to be the big new thing. You think so? Yeah, I do. Well,

just because some people want gas flexibility and they want to be able to drive mostly on electric. People are concerned about the range of electric vehicles. Like, am I going to get caught? Am I going to have to hang out somewhere for 12 hours while my vehicle charges ultimately? But yeah, again, my takeaway is it's good to have unions that way that workers are at the table and not just casually brought in and then casually dispatched with a year later. Yeah, I mean, it does suck that you have to cut 10% after you aggressively expand, given the demand.

I do think the impetus behind it, though, I mean, in terms of— I don't think—I think anybody who is banking on the same level of consumer demand and consumer sentiment over the last two years is absolutely foolish from a business point of view. And I do think that the president should acknowledge something like that. All right, guys, New York Times taking a little bit of heat, getting dragged a bit online for their latest article.

I'll go ahead and throw this tweet up on the screen, the commentary here. All right, so the New York Times article says, their solution to the housing crisis? Living with strangers. Thrown together by New York City's brutal housing market, these roommates find a way to get by, even in close quarters.

The commentary here from Kevin Allman is, the New York Times discovers roommates. Yeah. And this is what happens, Sagar, when you do not have any working class people amongst your rank and file that you would think that roommates was some sort of like new, modern, crazy invention,

when of course, especially in New York City, I mean, this is a time-honored tradition in the city. Exactly. So what is their contention here? I mean, whenever we look through this, that people find each other in unique ways online to live together. I mean, look, any person who's ever moved to an urban area knows that this is how it goes. Yeah. Especially if they're like pointing to the fact that people have like curtains and stuff in their living rooms i've visited friends in new york who there's like a whole scheme there yeah of like fake walls you know my roommates when i first moved to dc back you know a long time ago um on

craigslist yeah that's very common i still know people who do that yeah facebook now apparently there's like all these facebook groups yeah people will be like hi i'm looking for a roommate there's like these big groups of like 40 50000, 50,000 people or whatever, and everybody's always talking within there. I mean, whenever I graduated from college, I did the same thing. I was like, hey, is anybody moving to the same area that I am? Someone was like, yeah. And I didn't even know the guy.

You know, just move in. So my confession about this article, though, is that I actually liked it. Okay, all right. When I went and looked at it. So what did you get out of it? Well, it's very voyeuristic. It's all kinds of different people and like a little bit about their stories and then their living spaces which is always interesting to see inside people's apartments

and get like a little bit of a peek into their lives it reminded me of the like humans of New York photography just showing different people and like that's what's so great about New York and why I loved living there when I did live there is just the massive variety of people, all walks of life, all different ethnicities, backgrounds, doing different stuff, the amount of creative energy, people doing, you know, weird stuff you'd never think of, thrown together in the city and in this instance in tight quarters. So the actual, like the article itself, I kind of enjoyed looking through just because that's always, humans are interesting, right?

The framing of it, like it was some new and novel, crazy idea to have roommates was just, it was a little silly. Yeah, it was like people's new thing, roommates. Come on, I bet you can go back to the 70s and the 80s of people in classified ads. People have had roommates for a long time. Being like, roommate needed.

Anyway. These people are out of touch. People want classified ads. I mean, people have had rumors for a long time. Being like, roommate needed. I don't know. Anyway. These people are out of touch. That happened. We have some new comments that are pretty interesting from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez regarding the term Latinx. Let's go ahead and put this tweet up on the screen. This says, from Mediaite, AOC blasts fellow Democrats for resisting term Latinx. Quote, not about your re-election prospects. I think this was from an Instagram live that she did. And in it, here's

the full quote. She says, I also have a mini rant about this because there are some politicians, including Democratic politicians, that rail against the term Latinx. And they're like, this is so bad. This is so bad for the party, Like, blah, blah, blah. And it's almost like it hasn't struck some of these folks that another person's identity is not about your reelection prospects. I have a lot of thoughts about this. First and foremost, I just can't imagine this being like the hill that you die on. Oh, yeah. First and foremost, yes. I can imagine lots of things that are worthy hills to die. I support plenty of things that are not particularly popular that I'm not going to back down off of because they are policy things that I think would make a difference for the country and in people's lives.

And then it's your duty to make the case and persuade people. language that is thoroughly rejected by the country, including by people who are in the Hispanic community. Only 2% of Hispanic respondents actually use the term themselves. Like, why is this the thing that you are going to go to the mat over? And part of me, Sagar, wanted to be like, you know, she represents this, like, very blue district. It's not going to hurt her there. So if she wants to lean into this, then whatever. But the problem is she's such a representative of the broader left movement that what she says in the language that she uses has an impact on how the left of the country is portrayed and perceived by most of the nations. So with Bernie, you had someone who, you know, very intentionally used language that was extremely accessible, that had a lot of resonance, not just with the left, but truly sort of cross-ideological. That's why he's still one of the most popular politicians in the entire country. With AOC, she really has made it her brand to lean into this sort of niche academic language

that is like intentionally off-putting and has the impact of making your entire political project less popular. I just don't understand why you would want to do that. I don't get it either. I always think, you know, Bernie had a great ad in 2016, the America ad. It was like full of American flags. Fantastic ad. There's no way Ilhan Omar, or maybe she would, I don't get it either. I always think, you know, Bernie had a great ad in 2016, the America ad. It was like full of American flags.

Fantastic ad. There's just no way Ilhan Omar or maybe she would. I don't know. But I don't think that her or AOC would ever appear in an ad like that because like, oh, it supports imperialism or some other, you know, and they'll make up a bunch of other words that go along with it. Even the justification. I mean, what are you saying? So you're saying that the term Latinx is the best term. Why?

I mean, that's the other thing. What's your case for that? Your case is that gender is fluid, language is fluid, and I think people right now are using E as gender neutral in order to be inclusive as possible. We don't have to make drama over it. It's like, well, you're the one who's making the drama over it. So you're saying that it's not inclusive,

but then people who are actually Latino think that it's off-putting and weird and they call themselves Latino. So then are you accusing them of like internalized sexism or racism? See how far we can go down the rabbit hole? I think about, honestly, one of those guys that we talked about on the show, Uvalde, dad, who Latino, he lost one of his kids in the shooting and people were attacking him for shitposting Kyle Rittenhouse memes like a year earlier. How do you think we got to a point where a some probably, I know nothing about this man, I'm just going to make an assumption based upon the demographics of the region, but a very likely like multi-generational Mexican-American with roots in the area. That's, I'm just, again, speaking generally about

Uvalde and what I know about that region of South Texas. How did that person become a Republican and start doing this? I'm going to venture to say that it probably has a lot to do with something like this. Yeah. And here's the thing is, you know, how you speak, I think, depends a lot on what it is you're engaged in. So what I mean by that is, you know, for an activist, for someone who's at, like, the bleeding edge of cultural change, they're trying to push the language. Okay, I understand, like, language does matter and have an impact. And if that's your project, that's fine. The problem is that AOC's project for herself is to lean into this sort of like niche academic language, you know, very sort of like, you know, she has a real following and a lot of power and, you know, is very sort of like solidly grounded in that

academic language, which is not readily accessible to the masses. So that's her project for herself. The problem is that it doesn't stay there because she is such an emblem of the left movement. So it has bleed over effects. And there's this instinct on the left to almost like posture as being the most radical or the most niche, the most isolated from the mainstream, which, okay, if that's just like your thing, I guess, whatever. But if you're actually trying to build political power and take the left from being just a niche constituency to a broader actual political movement that could, you know, do something in the country, then this is not the way ultimately to go about it. So anyway, you know, it's just another little interesting window into how she wants to position herself. And ultimately, I saw somebody make this point on Twitter, like this is case in point why she will never be the successor to Bernie.

Yeah. Why she will never be in position to win a national election. You know, even I think to win statewide in New York, as blue a state as that is, I think would be difficult. Because she likes to put herself on the side of not even issue, but language that doesn't connect with a broad majority of Americans. Yeah, it's funny because Chuck Schumer definitely used to be afraid that she was going to win. He would kick her ass in the New York Super Bowl. I think he still is afraid because, I mean, he still will. He probably just doesn't want to deal with it. But even if he did, he would kick her ass in the New York primary.

There's no way. She's not going to get any votes upstate in New York. I mean, even then in New York City, maybe. I mean, the national brand and icon that she was when she won. I mean, I remember I was like, man, she is a force to be reckoned with. Well, and let me say, because I want to be fair here, she has great, what was so exciting about her at the beginning is, first of all, she has this background being like- Great story. Yeah, working as a bartender, being a regular person, getting energized by the burning

moon, and I'm going to jump in here, and I'm going to beat this out of touch, you know, old guy who's not even in the district and just takes it for granted. Amazing. She has incredible, I know she gets sort of like, you know, slammed a lot, but she does have incredible communication skills and ability. And you see that at times. She just made a comment recently that actually, that I really liked where she was talking about, you know, we don't live in a democracy. We live in an oligarchy that has democratic moments. And I thought, you know, that's a really good way. I think that's true. And that's a really good way to think about it. So she has that potential and has those moments. But increasingly, I think as she's, you know, come under attack routinely by Fox News and by why she's sort of

like been rewarded for this type of language and leaning into these types of fights, this is the direction that she's taken her brand. And so, like I said, ultimately what this says to me is she is not going to be the successor to Bernie Sanders. She's not going to win a nationwide election ever or be relevant, you know, from a national electoral perspective, even though she is very relevant nationally to the image of the left movement and probably very difficult even for her to win statewide in New York. Yeah, I think that's right. Welcome back to Breaking Points Intercept Edition. I'm here with Ryan Grimm, DC Bureau Chief of the Intercept, and here with my colleague, Ken Klippenstein. We're going to talk about a couple

of Ken's stories leading to some impact on Capitol Hill today. But first, we want to start with Amazon. And so recently, there was a letter from Congress sent to Amazon. We could put that up here. That was directed to David Clark, who was, what was his title? CFO? He was the CEO of the consumer side. CEO of the consumer side of the business. CEO of the consumer side of the business. Demanding answers about something that you exposed, which was basically a chat app, a chat censorship app that was going to make it impossible for workers to use particular words.

What kind of words was Amazon going to block its workers from saying to each other over this chat app? Yeah. So when this was first disclosed to me, what jumped out at me at the list was at first the words pertinent to labor unions, which apparently there are potential legal consequences because that's protected speech if workers want to discuss. We have entire laws built around. Right. And they're just now starting to be enforced in some way. To his credit, Biden's NLRB has been enforcing these laws to an extent not so... Probably the toughest agency in the Biden administration. Yeah. And so a number of them were about labor unions. But then I quickly realized there were other ones that were just about general working conditions,

not directly related to organized labor. For example, you can say restrooms or bathroom. And let's put that article up. Well, yeah, restrooms, bathroom. And do you think that was because people are complaining that they don't get long enough restroom breaks, complaining about the stench in the restroom, or what else? From your talking to workers, what's the rationale for blocking people from saying restroom? Because you would think if it's a collaborative workplace, hey, I have to run to the restroom. Can you

cover this thing? But no, you can't even do that. Right. So the impression that people had was just that they don't want them talking about. So I mentioned in the story that there was a high level meeting of Amazon executives, including Dave Clark, in which they discuss, you know, how do we make an app that they have a problem with employee retention, which is interesting in itself. They don't discuss in the meeting, you know, why that is. But they say, so what are we going to do about it? They said, well, what if we create this internal chat app where workers can share positive feelings and encouragement with each other? Good vibes. Yeah, exactly.

Good vibes. Good warehouse vibes. Yes. Yeah. And then quickly, it was raised, so what do we do about the dark side? feelings and encouragement. Good vibes. Yeah, exactly. Good vibes. Good warehouse vibes. Yes. And then quickly, it was raised, so what do we do about the dark side of social media as they put it at the meeting? And they said, well, we can just block and flag words that are going to make the conversation negative. And that happened to include this huge list of terms that wasn't just labor unions. As I said, it was bathrooms, it was fair pay, fair wages, things like that. And the idea was that this is going to enhance employee retention, make people increase employee

satisfaction, of course, without addressing the underlying causes. When you talk to workers, they say, I'd be fine to stay here if we could improve the conditions. It's just that it wears you out so quickly. And so as we had reported in the past, they have these punishing quotas that they have to meet in the factories. And a consequence of that is that people are urinating in bottles, defecating in bags to be able to meet these things. And we had internal documents reflecting not only that that was happening, but that management was aware of it and that they had formalized policy around punishing people for those things. Right.

And at the heart of all of this, to me, is their central driving kind of ideology is represented in TOT, their time off task. Like this is how, this is the stat that workers are kind of saddled with. And so they have everybody monitored so effectively that if you're in the bathroom or if you are walking slower than they think you ought to be walking, if it's taking a little bit longer for you to do something, they'll start to register that you're off task, TOT, and you're only allowed a certain amount of TOT.

And then you get a demerit, a couple of demerits and you can just be summarily fired. My understanding too is, and according to some Amazon workers, you can actually just be fired just by text basically. Like your thing shuts off and you're told you're done.

Because this TOT thing, the number came underneath the threshold that they wanted. And TOT was one of the abbreviations that you weren't allowed to say, which I found profound in the sense that to them, to Amazon, it's the most important thing, yet they won't let their employees say it. So they are clearly 100% aware that it is something their employees hate. Because if it was something that the employees bought into,

and were like, you know what? We're all in this together. People need their nose hair clippers in 24 hours, and we're going to get them these nose hair clippers. And they do do important work. They're keeping the country's supply. Yeah, in the absence of any sort of government-run logistics network, we have to rely on private businesses.

In the wake of the retail apocalypse. Right. They are actually legitimately doing important work. Some of the nose hair clippers, probably not that big of a deal. But if they believed in that mission and they believed, if the workers believed that time off task was essential to making that hum, then they wouldn't have it on the list as something only negative. Was there anything else on there that you could say was ambiguous? Or what made up the rest of the list? Well, some of it was even kind of like what you might call social justice terms. Like, I think the word

equality is one of them, which is just like, that is a broad term. You know, and as I was talking to people about it, workers are saying, well, there might even be use of these terms outside of the political context in which they're concerned about. That's going to make communicating difficult. So, I mean, it stuff like unfair they cast a wide net it's so interesting to me the discourse in the United States the obsession with Orwell and the idea of

Big Brother the state and not that that's not a concern but in my experience the people with the really scary tools are private corporations mega corporations

like Amazon people who in fact are contracting with the federal government to provide them a lot of services I had a conversation with an FBI counterintelligence officer some time ago. And I was asking him about their capabilities.

And he said, you know what we're really jealous of? Amazon. I wish we could have what they have. Amazon and Google. I wish we had that. And I was like, the FBI is jealous of me. Right. All right.

So Congress sends this letter to Dave Clark. Then what happens? And then the very next day, he announces his resignation, which came as a shock to a lot of Amazon industry watchers. He's been there for how long? I think over two decades. Yeah. An extremely high-level position, CEO of the consumer side. And the face of a lot of this stuff, he was one of the guys that was tweeting at Bernie Sanders saying, you know, you claim you're a progressive. Well, we just gave workers $15 an

hour. We're the real progressives. How about that? And just clearly antagonizing. Right. Is he the one who famously clapped back at Mark Pocan? Yes. And said, so for people to remember this one, that Mark Pocan said something like, you guys are so exploitative of your workers that they have to piss in bags. And he's like, that's, Dave Clark claps back, that's misinformation, shame on you, whatever he said to him. And then you clumped, chimed in. And then at that point, I start talking to, because I've been reporting on this for a while. I knew people on Amazon, and they were just laughing. Not only is it true, it is so prevalent that it's not something that's unknown to anybody. It's in memos, there are policies around it.

And we were able to substantiate that on a document basis, not even just interviews with workers, but like showing that it was formalized in policy, how they're going to respond to this, yelling at workers to stop doing this, without addressing why it's happening. So I think a lot of workers, I know that in the sense of getting sources to talk to me, they were really motivated by how dishonest and disingenuous the company was being and talking about something like that. Yeah. And I think that Clark stepping down the day after this letter came out, I think is an admission that this like clapping back kind of arrogant approach that Amazon is taking isn't the way to move, particularly because the Senate is

considering whether or not to pass legislation in the next couple of weeks that would ban it and a couple other companies, but Amazon being a primary target of it, ban it from favoring its own products, which is central to its profit margins. Right. And which I understand from staffers on the Hill, there's a lot of frustration on the part of Congress at Amazon's cavalier attitude, not just towards worker conditions, but even towards Congress. They are not responding to document requests that Congress has been sending them. Congress doesn't demand that you treat workers well, but they demand that you treat Congress well. Right, you're on our turf now. You better start.

Anyway, great reporting. We're going to talk about some more impact that some of our reporting had on Jared Kushner and his future investments. So stick around for that. This has been an episode of Breaking Points, The Intercept. And if you have a tip for Ken, you can find his number on Twitter or if you want to just give it to him. 202-510-1268. Use Signal. Yes, use Signal. I have open DMs, so don't only use that if it's something

that you're okay with the NSA reading. All right. Welcome back to Breaking Points, an Intercept edition. I'm Ryan Grimm, DC Bureau Chief with The Intercept. I'm here with my colleague Ken Klippenstein. Today we're going to talk about a letter that was sent recently by the House Oversight and Government, what's it called now, the Committee on Oversight and Reform. They change the name of this committee every two years, to Jared Kushner demanding a series of documents. And the documents that they're demanding are interesting. We'll see if they ever get them, but we'll go into later what they're asking for. But to start, let me give a bit of a long-winded windup

to set the kind of frame for people who may not have followed Jared Kushner's machinations over the years. So, and jump in here if there's anything I'm missing. But I think the key moment is 2007 is where all of this begins. Kushner takes over his family's troubled, somewhat troubled, but doing pretty well, real estate empire in New York City. He's this little young, thinks he's a wunderkind, and quickly engages in the most expensive real estate transaction in the history of New York City. He buys for $1.8 billion this property at 666 Fifth Avenue. Now, this is 2007. By 2007,

everybody involved in real estate was getting out of real estate. The regular people, some of them were still getting in, but even regular people by 2007 were like, this is looking a little bit shaky. I'm not sure where this is headed, but this doesn't feel very good. Kushner says, no, I want this property, 666 Fifth Avenue, 1.8 billion. Basically sinks his family's entire fortune into it because you're just absolutely leveraged to the hilt at this point. 2008, we know what happened, the financial crisis. The building is worth like half or less of that instantly. And now he's soon, 2009, 2010, he starts to have calls due on this loan, which is just absolutely not performing. He scrabbles together

a bunch of help, some of it thanks to Tom Barrack, who was later indicted as part of a Saudi influence scheme. He is able to kind of refinance it and just kick the can down the road long enough to get into the White House. So he becomes Donald Trump's advisor since he's his son-in-law in 2017. And his family starts a kind of tour of the Middle East, shaking down money for this property. And he's regularly in contact with his father, who's continuing to run this real estate firm. And he himself is meeting with the Qataris, with the Saudis, with the Emiratis, while at the same time that his real estate firm needs this bailout and is pushing policy at the same time, his business shakes down the Qataris, and the Qataris end up telling him no.

They later told me if we had known what was going to happen as a result of that, what they feel as a result of that, they would have just given him the money. It would have been much cheaper to just give him the money. So the Saudis and the UAE then blockade right after Trump visits Riyadh. You know, put the orb, remember the hands on the orb? They blockade Qatar. There is a base with 10,000 American troops in Qatar. And they're blockading it and threatening to invade Qatar.

And the Secretary of State Rex Tillerson condemns this publicly. The U.S. is like, this has to end. Kushner back channels to Trump, writes a little statement for him, which apparently what I was told was written by UAE Ambassador Yusuf Al-Otaiba, and sides with Saudi and says, hey, Qatar, I'm told there's a lot of terrorists there. So I'm fine with this blockade. That blockade ends up lasting the entire Trump term. A year later, Saudi Arabia butchers with a bone saw Jamal Khashoggi. Kushner becomes the number one defender globally and inside the White House of MBS. Mohammed bin Salman, who we now know, and it was clear at the time, ordered the killing of Khashoggi. Flash forward to 2021. Now that he's out of the White House, he starts a private equity

firm, starts an investment fund, goes to Riyadh, winds up with $2 billion. So your reporting is cited multiple times. Some of our reporting previously is cited in here, particularly because one of the things you exposed was just what a ridiculous investment this was. And that's not me talking. That's not you talking. So who was it that looked at this and said, why on earth would you give this kid money? Yeah, so in the course of working for the story,

my sources for it were people in the private equity world. I have to be vague about that. I don't want to get anybody in trouble. But what they told me was that when this investment vehicle was pitched, right after the Trump administration ended and they're out of government, these are pitched to some very high-level people

in the Wall Street world. There was ridicule and laughter after the presentation because they couldn't understand what the product was. They said, what are they selling? There's repeated reference to all our fancy connections throughout the region, but what is the actual, it's just kind of business speak. And my understanding is that in the business world, yes, that exists, but not at the level that these guys were pitched. You don't waste people in Wall Street at that level's time with this kind of pablum. And they had the impression that it was just influence peddling because all it was was we know this guy, we know this guy, we know this guy.

Look at all these people high up that are in this investment tool. There was no talk of what the actual assets are, what the plan is really. And there was also reporting that the advisors to the Saudi fund itself said, don't do this. Their own sovereign investment fund says, this is a very bad idea. Do not go ahead with it. They're overridden by MBS, which says something. And then they go ahead and invest it. But yeah, their own bureaucrats are saying that this is not a sound investment. So you have the Saudi investment fund people and you have top Wall Street private equity people saying,

this is way over the top. That obviously networking, who you know, these are important things in global capitalism. Obviously that's the case. But you need something more than that. Like who we know is important to us because of our real estate strategy that we're going to develop in Saigon. And because we know the right Saigonese officials,

you know, this is going to work for us or whatever. Like you have to have some reason that knowing these people is going to make you money. The Wall Street people and the Saudi people are like, you have nothing here. What is this? So you know people. Okay, so what does that mean? And so the implication, very strong implication left in this letter

is that this was just a payoff for the work that you did for Saudi interests during your time as advisor to President Trump and potentially a payoff for future work that you will do if you return to the White House. Which is the Qatar example that you cited before, you know, really suggests that not only was this a pro-Persian Gulf administration, but it was an intensely partisan one among parties within that even. Qatar, historically, the U.S. has never had any problems with.

We have a giant base there. They wash all sorts of money. They're the place where we would host the negotiations with the Taliban. It's sort of like the Switzerland of the Middle East. All of these different factions who are warring all over the place are allowed to come to Doha and kind of live in peace. And that's how you can sit down at the table with the Taliban. And what I was told is that the internal conflict with Qatar was the major reason that Secretary of State Tillerson ended up resigning.

Because he just, I mean, he's a longtime oil man. He was the, what, CEO of ExxonMobil for a number of years. And so he knows the region. He just thought it was crazy. Right, right. And so the question is, why do they have this very partisan position? Partisan not in the sense of Democrat or Republican, but in the sense of like specific regional jockeying.

Why are they siding with one specific party? And then, you know, I can guess. 1.8 billion reasons. And so toward the end of this, they ask for Kushner. They ask for, where do we got it here? All communications. All communications from January 17th to present discussing Thrive, which is his brother's business in the Middle East, including, but not limited to, Thrive's interactions with

Saudi government officials. And so this goes to the internecine nature of the government work and the business work that you had the real estate operation, you had Thrive, his brother's company, which was raising all sorts of venture capital fund. His brother met with the Qataris at one point, as we reported. And so they're asking for all communications with the Saudis about Thrive. So in other words, is he using his position to leverage investments to his family? I think from a distance, it looks like obviously he is. The question is, is this something that you can prove? They also ask for, quote, all communications between you and Crown Prince muhammad bin salman or other saudi officials

from january 2017 to the present and all documents related to such communications related to your or your family's present or future business ventures including but not limited to saudi investments or participation in any of these ventures and one of the things that we reported that they cite in this letter is that he used WhatsApp to communicate with MBS. And so that's an interesting question. The reason he would use WhatsApp is so he could go around the White House channels. Right, you're supposed to use the visual channels, not just because that formalizes things and your bureaucrats can understand what's going on, but also just so the historians get a picture of what the heck was going on during the administration, the Presidential Records Act. And also because who knows who's reading your WhatsApp chats. Oh yeah, and the

security completely. And so it's an interesting question then, if they subpoena these, I would assume he's deleted them, right? Could they get them from Facebook? Can they get them from the NSA? You know, the NSA is not supposed to be spying on White House officials, not supposed to be spying on American citizens at all. However, they are definitely monitoring Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. He's not an American citizen. That is somebody that is, every administration is like, yes, of course, we're going to try to spy on those types of figures. Now, you're not supposed to spy on a head of state, but he's not officially a head of state.

So where do you come down on the privacy question here? And do you think that this will go anywhere? Or do you think that Kushner, all he has to do, he knows that all he has to do is just stonewall this for six months and then Republicans will be back in power in the House? What people in the U.S. intelligence community and people close to Middle East governments in the region tell me is that it's important to understand this not as a historical artifact where it's potentially a reward for services rendered during the administration, but it could be something that is going to affect policy going forward. Because again, those same sources tell me that government officials in Saudi Arabia, in the UAE, take for granted that Trump is going to win the next election. Whether or not that's true, that's the attitude. And so when you have that attitude, when you have that assumption, the question is, well, how can we leverage him again to try to do,

to try to influence him, to try to get him to do things that we want? And I think that is the prism through which this kind of apparent influence peddling should be seen, not just something that pertained to the previous administration, but one that could have effects on the upcoming election and forthcoming administrations. Right. So they feel like another administration will be back in power that they can buy off, so that will sell out American interests. And as we have talked about a lot, they have some say over this. They are not just passive observers of American electoral politics.

They have in the past influenced approval ratings by either producing more oil or reducing the output of oil. When OPEC pushes more oil into the market, the price comes down. Very simple. And we're seeing that very strikingly now. And that's the impression that I get from folks familiar with the region, which is that, you know, I say, you know, they're devastating the American economy. This has a huge role in inflation. Very interesting that we don't hear about this, the Saudi oil's role in the inflation debate. It's just discussed as some sort of abstract economic theory, completely untethered to any of these kinds of things. I mean, we can go into why that is. People don't like to talk about Saudi Arabia generally. It's embarrassing to Washington. But I asked these guys, I say, isn't this going to enrage Biden, the Democrats?

You're really going to push them away and politicize the relationship. And again, the view of these governments is we don't think Biden's going to win. We think Trump's going to come back. So it doesn't matter. We don't care. Right. And so even if there is some relief on gas prices, and I expect actually, this is my guess, that after the midterms, when the damage is done to to democrats you'll start to see gas prices come down because the mission will have been accomplished yeah you won't get nasty letters like this from

republicans on the oversight committee who are just fine with whatever trump and kushner want to do in the middle east i mean most of most of them are there are some that that are not but then late 2023 or 2024 i bet you're going to start to see gas prices sing again. Very high levels. And the question is if the Democrats are going to be willing to be candid about this because they are fighting this behind the scenes. They are not messaging to the public to explain to them what exactly is happening. How many times have you seen Biden go out and say, hey, he says the Putin gas tax, which obviously Putin has a role in it, but I've never heard him say the MBS gas tax.

I've never seen him talk about the role of Saudi Arabia in this to try to stimulate some kind of response by the public to realize, hey, we're providing these countries with security paid for via US tax dollars. Maybe they have some responsibility to us. No, he never says any of that. And the reason is because the relationship is embarrassing. It's a sordid regime with terrible human rights record that they don't responsibility to us. No, he never says any of that. And the reason is because the relationship is embarrassing.

It's a sordid regime with terrible human rights record that they don't want to talk about. And so long as he continues to hide that and refuse to discuss it, people aren't going to understand why gas prices are what they are or they're going to have a simplistic understanding of why it is and the knock-on effects like inflation and things like that. So that's the big question to me is how much are they going to come out and finally discuss this? Because they never have. They've never been straight with the American people about this relationship. Particularly, and hopefully,

Russia's invasion of Ukraine will have ended by then, so that won't be driving gas prices, too. And the message would be quite simple. It would be, there's a tyrant in the Middle East who's making you pay $5 a gallon so that Trump can come back into office so that his friend Jared Kushner continues to run U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. It's pretty straightforward. You're paying $5 a gallon because this tyrant wants Trump in the White House. And unfortunately,

as simple as that message is, and I imagine the American public, you know, they're adults, they would understand. I don't think it's a secret why we maintain relations with those countries. If you look at Biden's rhetoric now, he's saying, he's saying, oh, the relationship, it's not, this isn't about oil. I'm going to go visit MBS. He's going to abrogate his promise to make Saudi Arabia a pariah. That was the language. Not a lot of uncertainty in language like that. Now he's saying he's going to meet with them. They're saying, well, why is that? They say, oh, it's because of the oil prices, which it obviously is.

He says, no, that has nothing to do with it. The relationship is deep and complex and it goes far beyond that. Just want to chit-chat with my good friend, Mr. Bonesaw. Right. You're treating Americans like children. Like, come on. They understand how this stuff works. Nobody's going to believe that.

Right. And if you told the American people, look, we're overlooking the butchering of this journalist and we're overlooking these human rights abuses because we need $2 gallon gas, a lot of people would be like, well, I don't want to say it out loud, but I'm okay with that. Trump did essentially that. A lot of people would say that. Yeah. Oh, Trump absolutely did that.

Yeah. I think it was Representative Tom Malinowski said to one of our reporters, Sarah Sirota, he said Trump had the right idea in the sense that he threatened to withdraw the U.S. military from the region unless they started producing oil quotas along the lines of what we wanted. And that worked. That worked against MBS. Yeah, we have power. That's not even a threat. That's not even a positive threat of doing anything.

That's just saying we will pull our support and then good luck dealing with Iran. So this notion that we don't have any leverage is just not true. Yeah, very true. Ken, great reporting as always. Thank you everybody for joining us here. This has been another episode of Breaking Points, The Intercept.

You can, if you have a tip for Ken, you can reach him on Signal. His Signal phone number is on his Twitter. Check out our podcast, Intercepts Deconstructed. I'm only doing Rising Fridays with Emily Jashinsky. Otherwise, I'm happy to come by here with Ken or anybody else from The Intercept. And thank you guys for indulging us.

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. I'm back with Nate Hockman. We did an episode a few weeks back where we talked about the future of the right, secularism, barstool conservatism, everything the audience I know is into. So I wanted to follow up with Nick. He just had a new piece in the New York Times. It's called What's After the Religious Right? Let me just ask you the most meta question I could ask you for breaking points, which is, and I know everyone's

thinking in the comment section, why write for the New York Times? You're at National Review. You're a fellow there. The tagline for this show is, say, screw you to the mainstream media. Why is it important to articulate your viewpoints to, let let's say a very unsympathetic audience like that I think well I think the reason that it's important is because it's an unsympathetic audience but this is like actually a conversation that I had with my friends when the New York Times originally reached out because like a lot of conservatives I spend a lot of times a lot of time dunking on the times and writing for them I think maybe some people would think that that was selling out. But to me, it's like the Times, for better or for worse, is the paper

of record, not just in America, but probably in the Western world. It's an enormous platform. And it's a reader base that is wildly ideologically different than the reader and viewer base that I'm usually talking to. So if I can take the opportunity to actually explain my point of view from my perspective, rather than letting other people tell that story, I think generally I'm willing to take that opportunity. Yeah. And I want to pull a line that you wrote in the piece, which you said, it's the culture wars.

Stupid. You're referencing James Carville, 1992, Bill Clinton's election, where he said, it's the economy, stupid. Basically, everything's about economics. And I definitely know there's a part of the Breaking Points audience, which is going to be a little unhappy with us focusing on culture wars, because of this idea that, hey, culture wars are divisive. Let's focus on the economy. Let's focus on healthcare. Let's focus on higher ed and inflation. You could take this in a right direction, take it in the left direction. Why is it the culture war is stupid, given all the problems we have in the country right now? Yeah, well, look, first of all,

let me say to the viewers who are sort of frustrated with the culture war discourse, I get it. The culture wars often do feel mind numbingly stupid a lot of the times, and they are divisive, right? I mean, one of the reasons that I think the cultural issues that we're debating in the culture wars are so important is because as we talked about on the reasons that I think the cultural issues that we're debating in the culture wars are so important is because, as we talked about on the last podcast I came on, these are the foundational political questions that we're debating, right? It's the meaning of men and women. It's the meaning of America. It's the meaning of national integrity, borders, et cetera. You can sort of go down the list. But those issues really sort of tap into a lot of electoral passion. People care about them.

So the sort of reframing of the James Carville, it's the economy stupid line from the 92 Bill Clinton campaign was sort of a partially tongue in cheek, partially serious way of pointing out that actually, for better or for worse, the debates that we're having in the culture wars are debates that matter to people. And while absolutely, you know, economics are important too, and making sure that people have good jobs and are able to sort of provide for their families, et cetera, et cetera, of course, those are important issues. But there's a certain impulse, I think, in the elite commentary to sort of sniff at culture war issues and say, well, those aren't serious issues, right? Those are issues that, you know, pundits talk about

because they want to sort of rile up the base, et cetera. But I actually think that these are, again, really, really important issues. And I think that the fact that people care about them is entirely legitimate. And I think, you know, as a Republican, I'd like to see the Republican Party recognize that to an extent. Yeah. And I really resonate with what you said, because I think we disagree on a lot of the issues that we're going to talk about in terms of the actual policy. But something I've learned the past few years is that part of what recognizing politics is, is you can't just say, oh, don't care about that. It goes in either direction. Like whether or not people agree, like let's say with LGBTQ rights being like the most important issue in the country, there are voters on the Democratic side, there are voters on the Republican side who definitely think that it is. It's not a conspiracy. We're not hoodwinked, they're not like, you know, consuming the opiate of the masses, like,

that's just their opinion. And what your duty is, as a person who's engaging in politics, is to recognize that fact and then operate accordingly. So I think that's why your thought is useful in that. So let's just actually go in and push on the assumption that basically underlying your piece, this idea that something's coming next after the religious right, because I think for a lot of listeners, especially people who are living in blue states or even cities, the idea that the religious right is going away doesn't make any sense whatsoever. You talk about this, Roe v. Wade is likely to be overturned. Obviously, you have this huge Republican backlash, which is probably going to lead to a successful red victory in the midterms. Explain the seeming

contradiction between what you're describing here. Right. And I think one of the reasons that this is a admittedly provocative thesis is because we're probably on the cusp of Roe v. Wade being overturned. But as I pointed out in the early paragraphs of the piece, Roe v. Wade being overturned would be more of a last gasp for the religious right than it really would be a sign of resurgent power, because the entire country is rapidly secularizing. Fewer and fewer Americans are going to church every single year, and the Republican Party has not been immune to that trend. I mean, we have seen drastic reductions in the number of Republican voters who routinely go to church and in the number of Republican voters who just self-identify as Christian or say that being Christian is an important part of the American identity. So my point was pointing out that amid

all of this sort of resurgent cultural war energy, because the cultural wars really are more fierce right now than they've been in a very long time, one aspect of the story I think that's getting missed is that this is not being driven primarily by the old religious right. There is a sort of secular cultural conservatism, which is ascendant and which is engaging in a lot of these debates and has an uneasy relationship, I think, with the old religious right, but is driven by Republican voters who don't necessarily go to church anymore. And that's going to result in a different Republican party, a different conservative movement, and ultimately, I think, a different country. Yeah, it's interesting. You do a good job of setting

up a dichotomy between the, let's say, the old culture war touch points and the new ones. Like, what are some of the old ones? Like, you listed, you know, school prayer, no-fault divorce, traditional gay rights. Like, expand on those, then we'll get into the new ones. Like, what were the defining parts about that? Yeah, I think, you know, the old Christian conservatism was trying to defend this old public sort of small C conservative Protestant moral order, which was why a lot of the sort of primary debates that it was concerned with had to do with things like the public view of sexuality and marriage. So to the old religious right, the really primary points of cultural division came about, you know, questions of whether or not gay people could get married,

whether or not sort of homosexuality should be mainstreamed in the public view, and then, of course, to just the role of religion in public life in issues like school prayer. And abortion, of course, is obviously an issue that is relevant to this as well. The new culture war conservatism, again, being driven by folks who don't necessarily go to church, is much more interested with questions of national identity, sort of a secular patriotism, racialism, pushing back against sort of left-wing a lot of the old religious right voters, but is framed in much more secular terms and is less concerned with the specifically religious and theological dimensions of our cultural debates, and more just with defending American voters of a variety of different racial and religious backgrounds who feel alienated from the modern cultural left, which is, I think, again, the energy that is driving the Republican Party today. Let me get personal for a second. I'm curious what you think about this dynamic you're describing, because I think something that folks don't know,

especially if they don't know you, is that you're a traditional social conservative. So I think what your piece did a great job of doing, and why I don't feel like a shill bringing you on to talk about it, is you're diagnosing a dynamic that various folks have to deal with whether they like it or not. So if you are a traditional social conservative, it's not like this rise of this new social conservatism is inherently going to be a pure win for you. I still know of conservatives who do not think, you know, I just had Yves Ramazoni on the realignment a few weeks ago. Like his whole thing is he thinks the school prayer issue should not be dead. And he has a whole bit there. So like, just talk about how you feel about this personally, as a person who comes from that traditional conservative space. Yeah, I appreciate you sort of teasing out that aspect

of the essay, because what I was trying to do in the essay was basically give a descriptive analysis of what I think is happening, rather than a normative analysis of what I was trying to do in the essay was basically give a descriptive analysis of what I think is happening, rather than a normative analysis of what I think should be happening in an ideal world. Because you're right, I am in many ways a sort of traditional old school social conservative. And I have really mixed feelings about what's happening on the right today. There are aspects of the essay where I point out that a lot of the new cultural conservatism, what people call barstool conservatism, of course, your viewers will be familiar with that, exemplified by people like Dave Portnoy, right? I mean, there are aspects of that that make a lot of traditional social

conservatives really uncomfortable. I mean, there's this famous clip of Dave Portnoy after the Roe League saying that if Republicans tried to ban abortion, he's going to become a Democrat. I mean, to me, as an ardent pro-lifer, that's unacceptable, right? So for the sort of old school traditional social conservatives, this new energy, on the one hand, presents this massive unexpected political opportunity to build a sort of center-right cultural conservative coalition that is capable of delivering on some of our priorities. But it also requires sharing a coalition with a lot of figures that I think we might find unsavory on an ideological level. And that I think is a loss. And it also indicates just this broader phenomenon of declining religiosity in America, which I also think is a reason to be concerned. So I am not necessarily on the whole celebrating this development, but I am engaging with the fact that it's happening and trying to sort of make sense of it. And that was the point of the essay. Yeah. And I also like your use of the term coalitions because it gets to what politics actually is. It's easy to just say that, oh, and this is me shouting out the breaking points listener. Oh, there's the establishment. So the coalition you're describing is a Republican Party, a conservative movement that has hawks, it has social conservatives, it has barstool conservatives.

Once again, like it or not, where are the tensions? And where do you think the tensions are going to start playing out, especially as we move outwards? Because I'm a little less interested in things leading up to the midterms. It's kind of funny. I was getting an argument of some of my socially conservative friends where they were saying, I don't think the Roe v. Wade overturn is going to affect the 2022 midterms. And I was like, look, I agree with you. But I think the real testing point will be in 2025, when a Republican governor votes or says something about how I think abortion rights should actually operate in a state. Once again, think back to 2006, Terry Schiavo, that very specific,

very Florida decision over end of life and euthanasia and those different issues. That was a very specific, literally familial issue. But that issue was a defining moment of the politics of the country then. So I think you shouldn't focus on court decisions, you should focus on practical effects. And once again, how Jeb Bush as governor of Florida responded to it. So I'm just curious how you think about this dynamic overall. Right. And I think you're absolutely right, Marshall. I think more or less 2022 is baked into the cake. You might see some movement on the margins. But really, the question is going to be when Republicans in 2024 and beyond have to start

answering really difficult questions that they didn't have to answer before Roe v. Wade was overturned, because before they could just wave their hands and say, well, I'm against Roe v. Wade. And now they have to actually explain in detail, what does that mean, right? Are we talking about a 15-week ban? Are we talking about a heartbeat ban? Are we talking about exceptions for rape and incest, right?

All of these more difficult questions that require detailed answers. That's something that they're going to be struggling with, particularly when it comes to appealing to these sort of more sort of socially moderate barstool conservatives who might have a real problem with quote unquote wokeness, right? With, you know, CRT and gender ideology in schools. They're uncomfortable with transgender athletes, right? All of these sort of new culture war issues, but are probably pro-choice, right? I mean, a lot of them probably agree with Dave Portnoy. And my sort of suspicion, and this was something that I was, a tension that I was teasing out at the end of the piece, was that on something like abortion, I think a lot of these sort of center right voters would probably be more or less comfortable with something like what Ron DeSantis

signed in Florida, which is a 15-week ban, which more or less resembles what most of the rest of the West has, with some exceptions. But if you start talking about a six-week ban, or a flat-out ban, or rape and incest exceptions, I think that's going to make a lot of these voters really uncomfortable, let alone sort of old religious right priorities around same-sex marriage and homosexuality, which I think is just not even on the table for these voters. So both sides of the spectrum are going to have to reckon with these tensions. And you don't have to resolve all of the internal tensions to have a functional coalition, because every political coalition has its fair share of tensions. But there are going to be have to be sacrifices on both sides. And I don't think either side is going to necessarily be entirely happy with the outcome.

You know, in my last bit here is I'm curious, how do you think Democrats are going to respond to this dynamic? Because once again, Dave Portnoy, and look, I actually, I admire how honest Dave was about his underlying politics. I think it's very tough for folks who operate in those sort of ambiguous political spaces just to be that directive, like, look, I'm a pro-choice first voter. Yes, I probably think free speech is cringe. Yes, he's probably not a fan of Taylor Lorenz. But all that aside, I'm voting on abortion. I think there are a lot of people like that, especially in media, because it's not particularly hip to identify with Joe

Biden's Democratic Party right now, who don't feel that way. But Dave was honest. That's a voting block, right? That's the dynamic there. So how do you think Democrats, how do you think they should put on your pure political analysis hat? And how do you think they are going to respond over the short and long term? Right. Well, I think those are two very fundamentally different questions, because if Democrats were smart and they were sort of capable of just assessing the scene as it is, they would pivot back to the sort of Bill Clinton line on cultural issues, which was where all the sort of Dave Portnoy voters were very comfortable with the Democratic Party back then, right? I mean, this new influx

of sort of center right on culture, but more moderate on the sort of old school social issues voters who are flooding into the Republican Party are doing so from the Democratic coalition. A lot of these guys are traditional Democratic voters who used to see the old religious right as the sort of puritanical schoolmarm of American life, which wanted to come into the bedroom and tell you what to do with porn, et cetera, et cetera. And now that the left is the one sort of vigorously enforcing these social orthodoxies, they're alienated from it and they're looking for an alternative in the Republican Party. But again, with issues like Roe v. Wade, there is an opportunity for Democrats to win some of those voters back, but they have to sort of be able to distance themselves from the cultural radicalism of their

left flank. And I just don't think the party right now is institutionally positioned to do that. They are entirely captured by powerful donors who very much are of this sort of elite cultural worldview, a powerful corporate media, which is very much captured by that worldview, and, you know, sort of institutions like teacher unions, which are completely uninterested in talking about the radicalization of the American public school curriculum. So those sort of institutional issues for the Democratic Party makes it very, very difficult for them to pivot on cultural issues, which is why you've seen moderate Democrats break with the sort of progressive wing of their party on economic issues like spending

and regulation, but the entire party is basically on lockstep on cultural issues. So again, the should and the will, I think, are two different questions. They should pivot to the right on culture and become sort of Bill Clinton cultural centrists and emphasize the popular economic parts of their program. But I don't think that they're going to. One last question, which I think is probably my only main bit of, once again, analytical pushback on your piece, which separate the exact policy bits there. How away has the old religious right really gone? You know, as you were just talking about porn, I thought, well, you know, J.D. Vance was just, you know, I don't want to say unearthed, because that suggests he was hiding this view, but because he gave an interview like

last year, he's the Republican, you know, Senate nominee for Ohio, he talked about banning porn. So I think what a smart center left person would probably say is, look, Nate, you know, or audience, I get that, you know, the woke stuff is cringe. It's all going too far. Like we as a Democratic Party need to be much more like Bill Clinton. You're starting to kind of see people like Ruben Gallego start to like kind of do this with his pushback against the use of the word Latinx. But guys, like don't forget all this like Barstool conservatism is basically just a Trojan horse. They're coming in and talking about CRT, which may make you uncomfortable. They're coming in talking about identity.

But at the end of the day, as seen with the JD quote, it's all going to be about banning porn again. Oh, and by the way, the gay marriage pivot didn't actually happen. What actually happened was they made a tactical and strategic retreat. And now that they see the Overton window expanding, they're going to be aggressive again. So what would you say to that bit of pushback, that it's all basically a Trojan horse? Yeah, I think there's sort of two separate questions there. The first one about the Trojan horse question and the sort of hysteria that you've heard from some corners of the left about

the fact that Roe v. Wade is going to mean that same-sex marriage is going to be overturned and they're going to be banning birth control, et cetera, et cetera. I don't buy that, right? I really don't think politically the Republican Party, you know, 55% of Republican voters now agree with same-sex marriage. It would just be political suicide for them to actually try to make that a part of their agenda. And there are different issues today that they're fighting about, right? Like the barstool conservative issue set is substantively different than the old religious right issue set. These are two different kinds of conservatism. So it's not, I think conflating the two is not the right way to think about it.

But it is true, of course, that Christian conservatism is still a powerful force in the Republican Party and will be for the rest of my lifetime, right? I mean, Christian voters in the Bible Belt are a cornerstone of the Republican electorate. And there's a reason that someone like Donald Trump, who was a lifelong pro-choicer and not exactly a sort of bastion of Christian sexual morality, felt the need to really make a serious outreach to evangelical conservative voters, because he knew that they were a fundamental part of his voter base. And he could break with party orthodoxy on trade and spending and welfare and immigration. But if he broke with party orthodoxy on abortion, for example, he'd be dead. So that is an important part of the Republican Party, and it will be for some time to come. in American politics going forward, I'm pointing out that it's declining. And it also doesn't have the same sort of monopoly over the Republican Party cultural agenda as it did 20 or 30 years

ago. Well said. I learned a lot this episode, Nate. Most importantly, to not wear a white shirt when I have a fake background. People who are still here for the whole interview, yes, don't come in for the poor outfitting choice. But no, this is a great piece. We'll make sure it's linked in the comments. And I also suggest that folks check out the rest of Nate's work because once again, the point of the segment isn't for to get everyone to agree with you on your specific policy ends. It's more just this idea of, I think this is really good analysis of dynamics that are coming into play. And because they're new dynamics, it's going to be difficult to sort through without being rigorous. So thanks for coming on the show again. Joining us now for our weekly partnership segment with The Lever

is a reporter at that wonderful outlet, Matthew Cunningham Cook. Great to see you, Matthew. Thanks for having me on, Crystal. Our pleasure. Our pleasure. So this is a bombshell that you dropped here. Got a lot of pickup. So I'm glad we're getting the opportunity to cover it as well. Go ahead and put this up on the screen. So Biden hikes Medicare prices and funnels profits to private insurers. The largest ever Medicare premium increase will pad the pockets of insurance executives who donated millions to the president's election campaign. Matthew, there are actually a lot of layers to the story, and there's a significant backstory here also regarding sort of FDA corruption

and the approval of a drug, very expensive drug for Alzheimer's that doesn't actually really seem to work. Can you take us from the beginning of the story to how we end up with this largest ever Medicare price hike? Yeah, I mean, so it starts, I mean, there's a bigger story where it's, you know, we've seen for the last 50 years, we've seen this creeping privatization of Medicare, where the idea is that even though Medicare has set up a system as a system to get insurers out of the equation, starting under Nixon and progressively expanded under

every president, is this idea that, hey, well, maybe insurers could do a good job. Maybe, you know, great-grandma is using too much, going to the doctor too much, you know, and insurers could help us solve that problem. So that's the bigger backstory. But since Biden came into office in June 2021, his FDA, over the recommendations of a scientific panel, approved this incredibly expensive drug, Aduhelm, that was produced by Biogen, that was a drug that really just was found to have not worked. But because of its enormous cost and because of poor modeling by CMS actuaries and potential conflicts of interest there, the Biden CMS used the drug to justify a world historic price increase for Medicare, where most people don't know that Medicare recipients do pay premiums.

They're directly debited out of their Social Security check, and it went up by $20 a month. So that's a 14.5% increase in just one year. Again, you know, all this media discussion about inflation will really hone in on workers' wages, but won't talk about the enormous growth in healthcare costs with this Medicare premium increase being kind of the sterling example of that. So it was approved, caused a massive premium increase. Then Biogen got a bunch of flack, lowered the price of the drug, then CMS got a bunch of flak, said that they would only cover the drug under very specific circumstances. And so Javier Becerra directed CMS to consider, well, maybe we should lower the premium increase given the problems

we've found with Adjuhelm. And ultimately, they decided not to lower the premium increase, even though it was based on assumptions that were totally wrong, totally faulty, totally wrong. You know, I actually remember reading about this drug in depth. I think the New York Times did a big story about it a while back. And there were very real and legitimate questions about whether there was a sort of conflict of interest or corruption issue here that led to the drug's approval. Because as you point out, not only does the research not really show that the drug is particularly effective for Alzheimer's, but it shows it can have dangers as well. And then you

add the expense on top of it. I never would have imagined reading that piece, though, that one of the implications would be a massive premium hike for all seniors who are dependent on Medicare. So you see this just ripple effect of how potential possible government corruption leads to hurting you in your pocketbook. And then the other piece of this that I just can't, I literally can't understand is the political part. Like you, correct me if I'm wrong, the administration could decide, you know what, we're not going to hike premiums on seniors right before the midterm election. And they decided not to do that. Like what? I mean, really, like what is the thinking that goes into that decision? I mean, I've often said Democrats have a kink for losing, you know. But I really do think that the core problem here is that top Biden administration officials are more interested in their next job than actually stopping Republicans. And so, I mean, you can see this with Jen Psaki, right? in their next job than actually stopping Republicans.

And so, I mean, you can see this with Jen Psaki, right? You know, she was, you know, negotiating her job with MSNBC while she was still press secretary. I think that that really plays, I think that in DC, there's, people are much more interested in having an Olympic-sized swimming pool than winning. I think that that's what their definition of winning really is. It's one big club.

So that to me, I think, is kind of the real big issue here, is that they're not actually interested in winning. Because if they were, then they wouldn't be doing things that materially make the lives of millions of seniors worse. The other piece of this, Matthew, is a media story, which is I'm so grateful to you guys for the reporting that you all do. And you specifically, I think, have broken already a number of really important stories. This got a lot of traction online. There was clearly a lot of public interest. It was covered in a lot of independent outlets like our own. But I haven't seen it picked

up by the mainstream press when, again, I mean, this is a really this is a bread and butter issue. It's going to have a massive impact on a whole number of people. It illustrates a number of core issues here in D.C. And there seems to be very little curiosity about it. What do you attribute that to? Yeah, I mean, I mean, I was talking on our podcast about this, that when I started out doing investigative reporting almost a decade ago, also with David, I mean, we've been working together off and on for a long time. You know, we used to have stories that would get a lot more pickup in the mainstream press, a lot more mainstream reporters reporting out what we were doing. And now that seems to have not happened, to just not happen anymore. And I think that what we do here at The Lever that really folks are not interested in

replicating is kind of hard-hitting economic reporting that speaks to the pocketbook issues of millions of Americans and avoids kind of culture war dislocations in favor of what's really impacting our elders, people who have worked their entire lives. And that to me is a big tragedy. Because again, the other flip side of this is that, so in the midst of this massive premium increase, you also see in April an 8.5 percent increase in the payments to privatized Medicare Advantage plans. make ends meet and keep their private offices open due to Medicare payments issues. Instead, they're now engaging in a massive giveaway to insurers that run Medicare Advantage plans. So it's really a very simple story. I mean, the poor are getting poorer and the rich are getting richer. And I think that the story did well because it speaks to what every American can really witness with their own eyes, which is that economic inequality, even this year, is massively accelerating and creating enormous amounts of social problems and dislocation. And

the only kind of response offered to it by the Democratic Party is more culture war stuff and not any type of real dedicated program to address the pocketbook needs of Americans. I think that is all very well said. As always, we're extremely grateful for your reporting and the lever for existing. And we always recommend to our viewers that you guys, if you're able, I know things are really tough for a lot of people, but if you are able to do it, go and subscribe to The Lever because they are filling a need that is just extraordinarily important within our media realm. So, Matthew, thank you for the great reporting. Guys, go check out more of their work, and we will see you again next week. Thank you, Matthew. Thanks so much for having me, Crystal. Hi, I'm Maximilian Alvarez. I'm the editor-in-chief of The Real News Network and host of the podcast

Working People, and this is The Art of Class War on Breaking Points. I want to start today's segment by thanking all of you watching for being so welcoming and encouraging as we've gotten this recurring series off the ground, and I want to thank you for all your thoughtful and constructive engagement with the segments that I've put out so far. It really does mean a lot to me, and I think it's a really special thing what we're doing here. And I just wanted to say up top that it's an honor to be in this struggle with all of you together. Now, the last segment in this series, as you well know, ended up being quite a bit longer than I anticipated. So I'm going to try to make this segment shorter, and we're going to dive straight into it.

Because what we are talking about today has become so pervasive, so widespread, and so commonly accepted as normal, that few of us can even imagine what an alternative would look like. We're talking today about bosses and managers interfering with employees' legally protected rights. Specifically, we're talking about bosses and managers retaliating against workers for exercising their right by engaging in, quote, protected activity. So first, let's start big, and then we're going to winnow down. So there are actually many different forms of protected activity when it comes to the workplace. And protected activities are defined as such because they are legally protected activities that workers can engage in without fear of retaliation from supervisors or employers.

That's what the word retaliation legally means in this case. I mean, bosses and managers love telling workers what they can and can't do on the job. And it often feels like they have just complete unchecked power to do whatever they want and that they don't have to follow any of the same rules that we do. And, you know, just being honest, for most of my life, I sure as hell didn't know that there were actually a whole lot of things that they can't do, but they do it anyway because they can get away with it. Protected activities, though, are outlined in a range of federal statutes, including the Americans with Disabilities Act, the Age Discrimination in Employment Act, the Commercial Motor Vehicle Safety Act, the Fair Labor Standards Act, the Family Medical Leave Act, the Whistleblower

Protection Act, and more. Exercising your equal employment opportunity rights is protected activity. It is illegal for employers to punish job applicants or employees for asserting their right to be free from employment discrimination and harassment. As the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission website states, quote, it is unlawful to retaliate against applicants or employees for filing or being a witness in an EEO charge, complaint, investigation, or lawsuit, communicating with a supervisor or manager about employment discrimination, including harassment, answering questions during an employer investigation of alleged harassment,

refusing to follow orders that would result in discrimination, resisting sexual advances, or intervening to protect others, requesting accommodation of a disability or for religious So by the letter of the law, that's how it's supposed to work. You're not supposed to be able to retaliate against workers for engaging in those activities. Of course, we know that this is so often not how it works in the real world. And there are a whole lot of reasons why that is the case that we just can't get into right now. But you probably already know why, right? But that doesn't mean that working people have no recourse. It is a pain in the ass, and it can take a long time and

frankly the agencies themselves are almost all overburdened and underfunded and have limited enforcement power. But you can use agencies like the National Labor Relations Board and the Equal Opportunity Employment Commission to hold employers accountable for violating your rights. And that is an important part of this total picture. Because if they are not held accountable, employers get used to feeling like they can do whatever they want. But they can't. And working people suffer needlessly when we resign ourselves to the notion

that they can. And when it comes to retaliation, employers have largely felt that they can get away with anything without facing any consequences. But hopefully that is changing. In 1997, out of all the charges filed with the Equal Opportunity Employment Commission, 22.6% of those charges pertained to retaliation, regardless of the statute the charge fell under. In 2021, retaliation charges comprised a whopping 56% of all charges filed with the commission. So retaliation, it would seem, is on the rise. But we can also see from this table that instances of people reporting employers for retaliation are also on the rise. And the more that people know their rights, the better we can know what to do when those rights are violated. And with the time that we have left, I want to focus on one specific area where it's really,

really important to know your rights, and that is the area of concerted activity. It is your legally protected right as a worker to engage in concerted activity without fear of retaliation from your boss. So what does that mean? Organizing. It means organizing, and it means taking collective action or engaging in an activity that can lead to collective action to address issues in the workplace. You have the right to act with your co- coworkers to address work-related issues. And that doesn't just mean organizing to form a union. It could involve joining with coworkers to talk directly to your employer, to a government agency, or even to the media about problems in your workplace.

It could involve a concerted refusal of unsafe working conditions. It could involve talking openly with one or more co-workers about your wages and benefits or other working conditions. Managers love telling us that we can't discuss our wages and salaries, but they legally cannot do that because doing so infringes on your right to know about and address disparities in pay and wage discrimination. Your boss cannot discharge, discipline, or threaten you for or coercively question you about engaging in these protected concerted

activities. As the National Labor Relations Board website lays out, quote, it is unlawful for an employer to interfere with, restrain, or coerce employees in the exercise of their rights. For example, employers may not respond to a union organizing drive by threatening, interrogating, or spying on pro-union employees, or by promising benefits if they forget about the union. Section 7 of the National Labor Relations Act guarantees employees, quote, the right to self-organization, to form, join, or assist labor organizations, to bargain collectively through representatives of their own choosing, and to engage in other concerted activities for the purpose of collective bargaining

or other mutual aid or protection, as well as the right to, quote, refrain from any or all such activities, end quote. Now, I know to some this may seem like a total, you know, no-duh, no-brainer kind of point to make, but you'd be surprised by how many workers don't organize or don't engage in concerted activity because they are afraid of how their boss and managers might retaliate. And that's why it is so important to know that there are real etched in stone rules about how they cannot retaliate. And that's why it is so important to know that there are real etched in stone rules about how they cannot retaliate against you for exercising your rights. And, you know, I mean, retaliation can take many forms. If bosses take action that adversely affects workers, or they threaten employees with adverse

consequences like closing the shop, loss of benefits, or making working conditions worse in response to workers supporting unionization or engaging in union activity, that's retaliation. If they promise workers additional benefits or preferable treatment, if they reject the union, if they interrogate you about organizing activity, or if they spy on workers who are organizing, if they withhold benefits or raises that were expected before talk of a union began, if they tell you you can't wear union buttons at work, that is retaliation. Yes, your relationship with your manager might change if you engage in concerted activity.

They may take it personally, and sometimes that really can't be helped. But if they respond in a retaliatory way to your protected activities, they are breaking the law. And yet, bosses do it all the time. It is so pervasive, and it is so brazen, and it drives me nuts, let alone everyone else out there who is confronting this stuff on a day-to-day basis. Because, I mean, the path to holding companies meaningfully accountable is so long, arduous, time-consuming, and often so expensive. And because so many workers can't really afford that and can't risk losing a paycheck, most just have to grin and bear it,

or at most, they quickly find another job. For bosses and the companies themselves, though, the benefits of retaliating against workers as a general practice outweigh the costs of maybe, possibly, getting caught and held legally accountable. It's really just the cost of doing business for them. And the cost is us and our rights And when I say it's pervasive, I mean it It actually dawned on me while I was preparing this segment That a shocking number of the worker interviews I've done of late And over the years center on some form of retaliation

Remember in our last segment, when we talked about the ironworkers at G&D Integrated LLC in Central Illinois? If you watched the whole interview I did at the Real News Network with former G&D employee John Hogsett and Vince DiDonato and Ben Scroggins, two organizers with the Ironworkers Union, you'll hear them detail what they allege was a concerted campaign of retaliatory harassment from management after a majority of workers overwhelmingly voted to unionize in October of 2021. Then, on March 1st, 2022, in a final, cruel act of suspected retaliation against workers for engaging in protected, concerted activity, GND laid off the vast majority of workers at the Morton, Illinois facility. Remember Evan Seyfried, the 20-year Ohio Kroger worker who, according to a lawsuit filed by the Seyfried family, tragically took his own life

after enduring a horrific six-month campaign of targeted bullying and harassment from his own managers? As the family and Evan's co-workers describe it, this was a campaign of terror, and it was a campaign done in retaliation for protected activities that Evan himself engaged in, even if those weren't concerted organizing activities. Evan filed safety and harassment complaints with Kroger HR, and he helped other employees file complaints. He even refused to comply with directives from a superior that he believed to be against the law and or company policy and he was targeted for it. And the list just goes on and on. I mean the path to the incredible Amazon labor union victory at

the JFK 8 warehouse on Staten Island in in many ways, started from the moment that Amazon retaliated against Christian Smalls by firing him for speaking out about the company's COVID safety policy in March of 2020. As companies always do, Amazon denied charges of retaliation. You'll seldom find a company, you know, like admitting to retaliation. And Amazon found some flimsy excuse to justify Smalls' firing. Although, in April of 2020, Amazon was famously caught with its pants down when a leaked memo from an internal meeting of Amazon leadership, a meeting that Jeff Bezos attended, showed executives hashing out their scheme to make a public example out of Smalls, including racist smears about him being, quote,

not smart or articulate, end quote. Again, Amazon claims it does not retaliate against workers for protected activities, but we have to square that with the fact that a lot of pro-union workers and organizers have either been fired, interrogated, had their work shifts adjusted in seemingly punitive ways, and surveilled, and been surveilled by the company. in the charge that Amazon had illegally fired Daquan Smith, a worker at the Staten Island complex and an Amazon labor union organizer who was living out of a homeless shelter at the time. And that's not all, not by a long shot. Jonathan Bailey co-founded Amazonians United, a network of Amazon workers around the country fighting for better wages and working conditions. As Olivia Salon and April Glazer wrote for NBC News in March of 2021, quote, the day after Jonathan Bailey organized a walkout over COVID-19 concerns at an Amazon warehouse in Queens, New York, he was, he said, detained during his lunch break by a manager in a black

camouflage vest who introduced himself as ex-FBI. Bailey was ushered to a side office and interrogated for 90 minutes, according to testimony filed to the National Labor Relations Board. A week later, Bailey received a formal write-up for harassment, although his managers would not tell him whom he had allegedly harassed, nor what he had allegedly said or done, end quote. Now, the NLRB found merit to that charge, that Amazon's interrogation and attempted intimidation of Bailey was an illegal form of retaliation, and Amazon had to settle. And just this past month, Amazon fired two worker organizers involved with the Amazon labor union. As Lauren Gurley wrote for Vice's motherboard, quote,

on May 3rd, Amazon Human Resources notified Matt Cusick, the comms lead for Amazon Labor Union and an Amazon warehouse worker, that he had been terminated for voluntary resignation due to a job abandonment, quote-unquote, according to an email obtained by Motherboard. Cusick had been on COVID-related leave. Amazon notified another warehouse employee, Tristan Dutchin, an outspoken ALU organizer whose photo has been prominently featured across major media outlets in recent weeks in a meeting on May 7th that he had been terminated for falling behind on productivity targets, Dutchin told Motherboard. Quote, I believe it was retaliatory, Dutchin told Gurley. Amazon knows that I'm making national headlines. They could see all my interviews with the press, end quote. Amazon claims the firings are, quote, unrelated to each other and unrelated to whether these individuals support any particular cause or group, end quote. You guys may remember that in my first installment of The Art of Class War here on Breaking Points,

I talked at length about how the ruling class weaponizes time against us, and I talked about the importance of all of us staying vigilant and committed to workers' struggles, even after the headlines and the initial excitement fades. The retaliation and suspected retaliation that we're talking about here is a perfect example of why we have to stay focused and not abandon these workers after the cameras and social media excitement are gone and they and their coworkers are left to fight off increasingly top-down pressure, increasing top-down pressure,

and increasingly tense environments at work. If you, like me, like so many of us, have excitedly been sharing news over the past two years of another unionization campaign or a strike or, you know, news of workers anywhere standing up for themselves and fighting for what they deserve, then I urge you to do regular Google searches about those same stories and to add the word retaliation into your search. And you'll see what I'm talking about. Or hell, I mean, go to the Equal Opportunity Employment Commission website, find the newsroom section where they post press

releases about settled, filed, and ongoing cases, type in the word retaliation, and give a good look for yourself at all the results. Again, the sad reality is that these documented cases represent merely a fraction of the, frankly, innumerable instances in this country where workers face retaliation for protected activity and don't report it. Even though the number of cases we can see is pretty staggering, the fact that they traditionally represent a small portion of instances of retaliation means that bosses and companies get comfortable believing that no one will notice or hold them accountable if and when they illegally retaliate against their workers. And frankly the penalties can be very minor and so they don't really change their

behavior unless they're slapped with like a big settlement that they have to pay out. But this is where we can play a role. In the same way that more people have trained themselves to instinctively whip out their phones and use their cameras to document civilian encounters with police and hold cops accountable for abusing their power or neglecting their duties. We can all help create a climate in which workers know that they are continuously supported and bosses know that they are continuously being watched. Again, like I said in that very first segment here on Breaking Points, we can't just excitedly jump from unionization vote to unionization vote to strike to strike and so on. Workers' struggles against the boss don't magically end after a successful union vote.

And sadly, no company has made that clearer than Starbucks. In an article for Vice published in April of this year, journalist Paul Blest wrote, quote, Over the past two months, Starbucks has fired workers across the country for allegedly breaking a sink on purpose, leaving at the end of a shift while one other worker was still working. Quote, safety violations after being interviewed inside the store by a television crew after hours, entering the store alone when arriving to work early, allegedly being late to work without letting anyone know ahead of time, allegedly recording supervisors without their permission, allegedly failing to close the store properly,

and more, end quote. And one of the examples that bless sites in that paragraph is the case of a group of workers at the Poplar and Highland Starbucks location in Memphis who were fired on February 8th. That group, who have become known as the Memphis Seven, made up the original union organizing committee at that store location. In a collective statement released publicly, the Memphis 7 said, quote, we were fired over mundane things. The things we were fired for are things that nobody has been fired over in the past. And we believe they fired us because we were too loud for Starbucks and they had to shut us down. The only way that they, you know, they knew how. End quote. Starbucks has denied allegations of

retaliation, saying that the workers were fired for violating safety and security policies, including remaining in the store after closing time with non-employees to do an interview with local media. Those Memphis workers did get some sweet vindication of their own this week, though, when the store that they were fired from voted to unionize with 11 yes votes and 3 no votes. On top of that, as Josh Idelson wrote in Bloomberg last month, quote, Starbucks Corporation violated federal law by firing, threatening, and carrying out surveillance on union activists in New York, U.S. Labor Board director said in a filing Friday that the company illegally interfered with employees' rights by firing six and retaliating against others. The NLRB complaint seeks remedies, including the reinstatement of the employees who were allegedly illegally fired or forced out, along with financial compensation and apology letters. Starbucks, in an emailed statement, disputed the claims and said the complaint represented

only the start of a litigation process." End quote. Again, Starbucks has disputed all the charges of retaliation against the company, even as those charges continue to stack up by the week. The National Labor Relations Board has even sued the coffee giant for allegedly retaliating against three employees in Phoenix who were involved in union organizing, demanding that those workers be immediately reinstated with their usual schedules and accommodations. From firings to de-scheduling and under-scheduling people, to putting pro-union workers on different shifts at different stores, the list of retaliation charges is a mile long at this point.

And again, Starbucks denies all of them. circumstances, and as workers and organizers around the country have been saying repeatedly, companies like Starbucks do their best to sidestep charges of retaliation by finding some reason for disciplinary action against pro-union workers. And those reasons usually focus on fine print violations that managers never cared about before or that were not serious issues before workers made their organizing efforts known, which is why it is so important for anyone thinking of engaging in concerted activity to take care and take precautions, keep a paper trail, have witnesses, get things in writing before you move forward. Now, this is the playbook that workers at the College Avenue Starbucks location in Ithaca, New York, have said that managers have been following

since they made their desire for a union known and successfully voted to unionize on April 8th of this year. Ithaca actually made history and became the first city in the U.S. where all Starbucks locations voted to unionize, and all three of the Ithaca locations unionized on the same day. Barely a week after that, workers at the College Avenue location staged a walkout after a grease trap in the kitchen, which they had complained about before, overflowed and spilled a gross, smelly stew of congealed grease and runoff onto the floor. When customers complained about the smell and workers complained about the safety hazard, the shift supervisor made the decision to close the store. Then the acting manager flipped out, the acting manager at the time flipped out, rushed to the store, and demanded that they reopen.

And so the whole crew went on a one-day strike in protest. Now last week, in what certainly appears to be an escalation in Starbucks' alleged retaliation campaign, the company announced that it would be permanently closing the College Avenue location on June 10th. For my podcast Working People this week, I spoke with Nadia Vitek, a partner at the College Avenue location and a worker organizer with Starbucks Workers United. Listen as Nadia first describes the treatment one of their co-workers received by management and then sums up the message that Starbucks is bluntly sending to any workers out there who are even thinking of unionizing. And for context, like a final written warning means that if he gets written up again, he'll be fired.

And so he feels like he has that. My specific co-worker who got a final written warning has been targeted by her like really heavily. We also have a fan that like blows cool air on us because our AC doesn't really reach us behind the bar. And she decided one day that it's not quote up to standard and that it's a tripping hazard. And so she unplugged it and said we can only use it when the store is closed. And, you know, it started getting really hot recently. And so the coworker I was just talking about, and this actually prompted her to give him a final written warning. He was like, I'm sorry, it's like too hot. I'm going to leave this out. You can do whatever you want to me. Um, she took

the fan and threw it in the trash. And then she left, went outside, took a phone call, came back, handed him that final written warning that had like, like reasoning that like backed up like a few weeks behind too. I mean, definitely it's retaliation. I don't think there's any other way to look at it. But I think like on top of that, they're also like their goal in this isn't to harm us like at the college app are the consequences. This is just like a new escalation in their union busting campaign as a whole, not just in Ithaca. And like it has consequences that are far reaching, which is why like us at College Avenue, we're going to fight this as hard as we can. And we have like the support financially and in other ways to do that. Again, Starbucks denies charges that this is an act of

retaliation for workers unionizing. Quote, we open and close stores as a regular part of our operations, Starbucks spokesperson Reggie Borges told Bloomberg regarding the announced closure. By the time you watch this, the College Avenue store will be closed. Workers like Nadia have told me that the main way people can support them is by paying attention to this shit and calling it out whenever they see it. And, you know, frankly, it is depressing

to see the number of GoFundMes that are circulating right now for fired pro-union workers, not just at Starbucks, but a whole lot of people who have engaged in unionizing, organizing activities, have been celebrated online, have subsequently been fired, and now are struggling to pay rent. And so if you are able to offer immediate support to them while they are fighting to get legal recourse, please do so. Starbucks, Amazon, Kroger, G&D Integrated, and a million other lesser-known employers need to know that we are watching them, and that they cannot just violate our rights and face no consequences. To them I say, we see your asses, and we are not

going to let you get away with this bullshit. Thank you for watching this 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. Take care of yourselves. Take care of each other. Solidarity forever.