Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - Mini Show #55: Queen Elizabeth, Union Busting, Insider Trading, Credit Cards, & More!

Episode Date: September 18, 2022

Krystal, Saagar, & friends talk about youth voters, Queen Elizabeth, Saudi funding, congressional insider trading, credit card monopoly, & 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/Ryan Grim: https://theintercept.com/podcasts/deconstructed/ Emily Jashinsky: https://thefederalist.com/author/emilyjashinsky/ Matt Stoller: https://mattstoller.substack.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Wade has shifted the types of voters who were registering to vote and apparently based on special elections who are then going ahead and actually voting in these elections. It's not just though that women are registering more than men. There's some new data that indicates young people who tend to be more Democratic are also registering in larger numbers. Let's go ahead and put this up on the screen. This analysis from the Houston Chronicle says young Democrats are flocking to register to vote in Texas after abortion ruling data shows. They point to, in particular, this is data from that company TargetSmart again, which I want to fully disclose is a Democratic-aligned firm, but one that they really rely on in terms of accurate data for their

own voter drive efforts. They say that of 80,000 new voters added through the end of July, Democrats now have a 10 percentage point advantage, making up 42% to Republicans, 32. Before the ruling, Republicans had a five point advantage. So it went from Republicans having a five point advantage to Democrats having a 10 point advantage in terms of voter registration. And they are finding that it's not just women, that new voter registrants tend to be younger. And obviously that's one of the trickiest parts of the Democratic base to turn out. So interesting news here. Yeah, it is. I mean, look, note this very carefully. Are we saying Texas will go blue? No. Are we saying any- Bears gonna win.

Are we pointing only to young Democrat registration, which is a verifiable fact? That's it. And it has gone up after the abortion ruling. Will it sway Texas politics? Probably not. Will Beto win? Probably not. Will this possibly change things on the city and the gubernatorial level? Or sorry, on the local level? Yeah, maybe, maybe. And I think in trends, then you could say, well, that's interesting because it could boost young voter turnout maybe in other blue states, possibly red states, which would then have downstream effects on midterm races and others. It's just a data point that we're trying to point to and look at, especially given what's going on with polling right now. I think it's an important caveat.

Yeah, that's exactly right. I mean this is just – we're trying to read the tea leaves. It's very difficult to know whether the polling is accurate, but the voter registration data is what it is. And we have seen, you know, the interesting thing about the data related to women is that it's very tied to whether or not they saw abortion access as being on the ballot. So in Kansas, where you had that direct ballot initiative, you had the largest swing in terms of new women registering to vote. In other states, I think it was Michigan was another one where they felt like, okay, the governor's race is on the ballot. I think there's going to be also a direct abortion access ballot initiative there

as well. You saw significant swings. In other states like New York, where they didn't feel abortion access was as threatened, you didn't see that same shift in voter registration data. So it's a pretty compelling case that is very much directly tied to Roe and what happened there. So what is this all going to mean for the fall? Hard to say, but obviously it's harder to get young people to turn out. When you see young people registering, that bodes well generally for the Democratic Party and is a good indicator for them. Is it enough to overcome in Texas? No, but you could extrapolate that this is likely happening in other states as well where it could ultimately matter. Exactly. So look, if there is ground for surprise, it will possibly come from these things that very notoriously don't show up in polls. It's

one of the reasons Obama was such a stunner back in 2008. Young people, obviously, you know, if the turnout actually changes even a little bit from their end, can change and impact the election. We'll see how it goes, but interesting stuff really happening all around the country as a result of DOPS, which has really just thrown, it's really just thrown things in a different direction than where things that were already headed. The death of the queen last week

sparked a million Twitter takes, probably way more than that, actually. Far more than they did. Good, bad, and ugly. Yes. And also some censorship of those Twitter takes. Let's go ahead and put this up on the screen here. Twitter says it censored a tweet wishing that Queen Elizabeth would suffer on her deathbed because it might, quote, harass, intimidate, or silence her.

Okay. But is it possible for literally anyone to do that to a monarch with a single tweet. It is a fascinating case to me. The Intercept has the report here. They say the policy that Twitter invoked to justify taking this tweet down, this was from a professor, was intended to protect the world's longest reigning monarch who died that day from being silenced. Hard to see how that really justifies. Let me read you the tweet. I mean, I'm not like, this is not how I would have phrased things, even as I have a critique of the monarchy and of course imperialism.

But what this professor said was, I heard the chief monarch of a thieving, raping, genocidal empire is finally dying. May her pain be excruciating. One of the points that I saw made Sager is that if this was said about, you know, one of the leaders of an official, like, bad guy state, there's no way they would take it down. Well, it's also just so foolish. The queen is a public figure.

By the way, I think that's ignorant and a stupid tweet. But it doesn't mean that it should have been taken down. It's just ludicrous that they would take it down for, quote, unquote, abusive purposes. By the way, she was getting raked, dunked on, and everybody was calling her a fool, which is punishment enough. Even Bezos apparently jumped in. Yeah. Well, and that was very convenient because this professor has also been a supporter of the Amazon labor union efforts. Really? I'm sure with Chris Smalls. So funny that Bezos then goes and weighs in. I'm as a big of critic of Bezos, but I don't think that had anything to do with it. I think it was just cringe on her part. Yeah, look, I mean, look, let's do a little history lesson.

This is a fun one. Here's what she actually said. She said, I heard the chief monarch of a thieving, raping, genocidal empire is finally dying. May her pain be excruciating. Put your critique of the monarchy, the institution itself aside. Queen Elizabeth presided over rapid decolonization of the entire empire, was the quote-unquote queen of the commonwealth, and had nothing to do with any colonialism whatsoever. In fact, and this is what annoys the hell out of me, Crystal, which is that the British government is the one responsible for the empire. And they are the ones who, by the way, all the jewels, all of that, they own it. They can return it to the Indian government and should, having been to the British Museum,

tomorrow. The monarchy has no control. Okay, but it's not like she is an emblem of that era of colonialization. I don't think so. It absolutely is. That's Tucker. Okay, come on.

Did you see the monologue that Tucker did about this? No, I didn't. He explicitly made the case that the reason that she is so wonderful and so great is because she is the symbol of that era of the British Empire. And she is. He's right about that. I obviously totally disagree with his take on how that should be viewed. But she is the symbol of that. And it's not like she was objecting to the horrific things that were going on during

the British colonial period. She wasn't even alive during that happening. Or fine, she wasn't even conscious. Her actual coming of age happened during World War II, where she served as a mechanic. She became queen in the 1950s and again, presided over peaceful decolonization. Or at the very least, the British Empire didn't fight, quote unquote, while all that was happening under her. Many countries became republics while she was queen. She didn't do anything. In fact, she, like, sent and attended ceremonies while that happened. Look, again, you can put your critique. The monarchy has not been in charge of British foreign policy basically since, like, whoever the son of King George III was. Queen Victoria was the last person who had any say

in the British Empire whatsoever. And even though this, look again, my family is Indian. We were literally oppressed by the British. You know who I blame? Benjamin Disraeli, the Prime Minister of Britain. He's the person who was in charge of the quote unquote, Emperor of India and proclaim, by the way, this is another thing. The government is the one that proclaimed Queen Victoria, the Empress of India, not the other way around. Everybody points to the jewels. I agree. Guess who stole them?

The British Army on behalf of the British Empire. It's not like the monarchy, outside of getting pensions, again, from the British government. It just annoys me because people put their transposed, their woke BS onto the monarchy and not the government. Okay, but first of all, monarchy is a disgusting system of government. Yeah, sure. We broke away for a reason. Exactly. It should end.

Number two, the people who are celebrating her the most in terms of the right wing in America are directly tying her to that legacy and saying things like it was better when I don't know what Tucker said. It was better when England ruled Rhodesia. That's what he literally was saying. And tying her to that and saying she's a symbol of that era. So let's not pretend like she is not connected to that or like she had a critique of it whatsoever.

So to get back to the point here, the bottom line is people had a lot of takes, and they should be allowed to say them, and they shouldn't be censored. And if they said it about anyone else around the world, they wouldn't be. And it shows you how haphazard this whole system of censorship is and how foolish it is for the liberals who advocate for it to not only continue, but to go even further in terms of censorship. Even though I think this woman is lugerous and claims oppression. By the way, I looked into her background, went to Dartmouth, child of rich immigrants, went to Ivy League institutions,

get some fake, you know, counter-critical racist linguist paid position at Carnegie Mellon. She's the opposite of oppressed in the United States. But hey, listen, shouldn't be censored even- Well, and Carnegie Mellon

is now trashing her too, going against some of their other free speech claims when they protected others. Does Harnie Mellon have? I don't know. Yes, they have. In terms of Bezos, too. I also think that he's seen sort of Elon Musk dabbling in these, like, becoming a fanboy of the right and saw this as an opportunity for him to make his own moves in that regard.

He always is the discount Elon in these regards. It's like discount takes, discount space. True. That I is the discount Elon in these circumstances. Like discount takes, discount space. True. That I can absolutely agree with. All right. Look, I'm not a fan of the institution of monarchy. I'm just saying like a lot of the takes that are out there right now are dramatically uninformed and actually just straight up stupid. So people should read about, by the way, the history of the empire is very interesting in both in its decline, the way it was ruled, its actual legacy, both the horrific parts, and then really in terms of how it all coincided with their eventual culmination in the National Health Service, how they consciously chose. There's a hopeful story

there too. It's interesting. That's all I'm saying. All right. Everybody go read a book. Interesting little update from former George W. Bush press secretary Ari Fleischer. Let's go ahead and put this tear sheet up on the screen from HuffPost. Ari Fleischer accused of bowing to Saudi LiveGulf employer after halting 9-11 tweets.

Fleischer, a former press secretary for President George W. Bush and a Fox News contributor, said the speculation was foolish conspiracy theory. Okay, so here's what happened. Okay, every year,

I didn't actually know that he does this, but apparently every year since 9-11, Ari Fleischer has been on 9-11 sort of live tweeting what happened. Since Twitter existed. Since Twitter existed. It's been like 10 years. I used to follow it too.

So he would do this every year. So this year, something has changed. Ari Fleischer's communications firm has now been hired by Saudi-backed Live Golf Tournament. So apparently making some money from the Saudis. And then lo and behold, he sends out this tweet just before the 21st anniversary of that terrorist attack. He says, quote, I have decided that my story has been told

and I will not live tweet what took place on 9-11 again. It's time to let it rest. There is nothing new to let it rest. There is nothing new to say or reveal. Thank you for reading and for caring about our nation's history. Why did it change from 19 years to 20 years to 21 years? The only thing that's changed is that now you take Saudi money. And this exactly highlights the issue with these people. Ari Fleischer was with President Bush on 9-11.

He was an Iraq war defender. He's a Fox News stalwart. And now he works for Saudi Arabia, straight up, literally taking Saudi cash. It's completely disgusting. I mean, 9-11 is this guy's whole identity. Huge thing. And then for a big enough paycheck, he's the one to be like, nah, we're good. I think we've said enough here. And one of the most popular things is it also blames his travel schedule. Bro, you obviously didn't write those yourself.

Like, you clearly just have interns who repost them and schedule them. Yeah, you can schedule them in advance. It's not that hard. You really want to keep it going. I mean, at the very least, like, wait a couple years until your Saudi contract is, you know, not freshly inked. There were a lot of people online, of course, who noted this strange connection between Ari Fleischer changing his longstanding tradition and getting a bunch of cash from the Saudis. A Hill reporter said, cannot get over Ari Fleischer getting a PR job with the Saudis and then announcing that actually his 9-11 play-by-play tweets have run their course. Yeah, it's too perfect.

And you're right. They're absolutely soulless. This was the core of his whole identity. But for the right price, goodbye. We'll move on. Enough to say about 9-11. Enough to say. I've said my piece.

It's like, again, you've said it for years and years and years, and now you've decided not to with a completely fake excuse. Only one variable has changed in this. And there's a lot of this stuff going on with Live Golf. Remember, who was it? It was like Phil Mickelson. He was talking about Saudi. And he's like, oh, I didn't mean it. Or they retracted his covering up for the regime. Well, I mean, Trump's taken millions and millions. We don't even know how much

to host their tournaments. He's talking it up. And it's a great thing. And this is a guy who was in the White House and may well be in the White House again with this kind of very direct financial interest in the Saudi government. It's disgraceful. And that's to say nothing of Kushner and his cash that he's taken from them. Very true. Something we've been covering for a while here is the distance between the rhetoric from Democrats about what an existential threat certain Republicans are to democracy and their practice of propping some of the most fringe extremist Republicans up in Republican primaries to the tune of millions of dollars with the expectation that maybe, you know, these ones who are the

furthest on the fringe will be easiest to defeat in November. So Vice President Kamala Harris was actually grilled about exactly this practice by Chuck Todd. And she didn't have a lot to say about it. Let's take a listen. When you see the Democratic Party and some parts of the party funding ads to promote some of these election deniers in primaries, whether it's Michigan, the high profile race there, Illinois, Colorado, New Hampshire, it looks like a cynical, you know, a little bit cynical. And the president went out of his way to say there are good Republicans here. Should you leave the good Republicans alone in a primary? Is the Democratic Party making a mistake here by, you know, those people could win if you're not careful.

I mean, listen, I'm not going to tell people how to run their campaigns. You know, I ran in terms of statewide office. Would you have done this? Is this something you'd be comfortable with? tell people how to run their campaigns. I ran in terms of statewide office. Would you have done this? Is this something you'd be comfortable with? I'm not going to tell people how to run their campaigns, Chuck. I ran statewide for attorney general, re-election, won both times for Senate, won that race. And I know that it is best to let a candidate along with their advisors, let them make the decision based on what they believe is in the best interest of their state. Like, what does that even mean? It means nothing, as usual. It means absolutely nothing. They have no defense. There is no defense. There is no defense of it. Either it's an existential

threat and we have to do everything we can to stop it or it's not. And very clearly, like based on what not just these Democratic candidates, a lot of outside Democratic aligned groups that have been spending money to prop up these candidates like, OK, so and it wasn't I think there was even DCCC like direct Democratic Party money that was going into some of these primaries as well, because I seem to remember Sean Patrick Loney. That's right. Having to defend exactly that. One of the most egregious examples was they had a dude who literally voted for Trump's impeachment over January 6th in what was in Michigan. Right. And they spent money to defeat him with this guy who's a total election denier. And I mean, so you can't defend it. You can't defend it based on sort of the rhetoric that they have been using. Now, what I've seen Sean Patrick Maloney saying is basically like, listen, they're all bad.

And so we got to win. And that's the most important thing. Okay, like make that case. But she just completely dodges here. Yeah, no, it's completely, exactly. At least do what Pelosi did. She's like, no, we did it and it's because we want to win

and we think that we'll, or I think James Carville did that too. He was like, yeah, that's what it do. It's called politics. It's like, she doesn't even have the cynical nature enough, which she clearly believes. She's like, no, I stand by it 100%

and just spouts like literal gobbledygook, which is why she is just so awful at this, truly. So we've got an update for you on Starbucks Corporate and how they have really become some of the worst union busters in the entire country. Their supposedly progressive rhetoric and ethos notwithstanding here, apparently not a barrier to them trying to crush their workers in every way possible. The latest development is that one of the original, let's put this up on the screen, one of the original Buffalo union organizers, those Buffalo stores, the very first to unionize, Jazz Brissac, she says she has been forced out by the company. Now, the company disputes this.

She's been pushing for a different schedule. They say that, hey, we're treating you like everybody else and sorry, we can't accommodate you. So I guess you're just going to have to leave. She says, no, you've accommodated all kinds of other people. But for some reason, when it came to me, you've been doing everything you can to push me out the door. This comes on the heels. I mean, Starbucks is under fire for firing a number of top union organizers across the country. The NLRB is already taking action against them in a number of those instances. across the country. The NLRB is already taking action against them in a number of those instances. So this would be far from the first case where Starbucks has been caught pushing out or outright firing labor union organizers.

The other piece of this is equally sort of brazen and really astonishing. Let's go ahead and put this next piece up on the screen. Ken Klippenstein tweeting out a Reuters article here that says, Starbucks announces new student loan repayment tools and a savings account program for all U.S. employees who are not union members. Now, Starbucks has been at this for a while now. This was the first thing Howard Schultz did, the former CEO, when they brought him back is he said, hey, we're going to give new benefits to everyone except union members. The National Labor Relations Board has already said, you can't do this. This is brazenly illegal. And yet they're still doing the same thing, just completely defying what the NLRB has said is illegal union busting tactics. Yeah, it's totally crazy. I think what the part, really, is not just what happened to her, which, you know, obviously,

it's clearly a retaliation move. She's been on the show before, too, so people should go back. Maybe we'll put links, James, in the description of this video so people can go and watch those. But, yeah, I mean, they have been escalating their tactics

from the beginning, that illegal move on benefits for some, but not for others, clearly to try and influence future votes. But to their credit, they're not falling for it. Every time a vote comes around for unionization, it just wins. So it's not like the company's employees themselves are actually listening and are bowing to the intimidation tactics. That doesn't stop them from being illegal and terrible at the same time. Yes. All of that. All of that. Yeah. A lot of the union busting tactics at Starbucks and at Amazon and some of these other companies as well seem to actually be backfiring because it just shows the workers, I think especially at a company like Starbucks, how full of it they were when

they were spouting all this like, oh, we're a progressive workplace and our partners, our baristas, blah, blah, blah. No, it really shows exactly what they're all about. And it's just about control and profits, ultimately. I do think that, I mean, the Starbucks example is one we keep coming back to because it is the place where the sort of national grassroots union movement has been the fastest paced. It's really has spread like wildfire. You now have, I think, like 234 Starbucks stores nationwide that have unionized. Previously, there wasn't even a single one. So that's crazy. In the same respect, it also shows you just what an uphill slog it is, both through the company tactics, but also the fact, I think they have like 9,000 stores.

So even with this huge movement, wildly successful, historic, biggest in history effort within fast food industry, it still and opens up the door to these types of extreme and illegal pressure tactics from corporations. And of course, the NLRB, which has been much better under Joe Biden, still not perfect, their hands are tied in terms of really having effective methods of making companies pay for engaging in these sort of illegal tactics, which is why they just continue to do it. Sounds like a good argument for sectoral bargaining. Indeed it does. All right, guys, more for y'all later. All right, we're joined next by Congressman Ro Khanna.

He's a Democrat from California who represents Silicon Valley, and we're glad to have him here on the first inaugural episode of CounterPoints. Congressman, thank you for joining us. Congratulations. I'm excited about the show. Yeah. And so actually, I'm curious, what kind of media consumption goes on among your colleagues in Congress, both Democrats and Republicans? Where are they getting their information? Is it curated for them by staff? And if it's their names in it, they're seeing it? What are they personally scrolling? Well, certainly most members get anything that's written or said about them from staff.

But then I think it's generational. I mean, there are some of the members who have been here a while who still read the New York Times, the Washington Post, may read their hometown paper every day. Then there are others of us who may scroll through our Twitter feed, scroll through social media, go to different websites to get a sense of what's going on. And, of course, check independent media as well. It's a good question. I'm always curious about that because the idea of Donald Trump sitting in the Oval Office scrolling through his Twitter mentions, it was just such a remarkable image, but almost certainly a real one. Congressman, do you find yourself looking at what people are saying in your Twitter mentions too? I mean, not like Donald Trump, not obsessed about it. But, you know, the reason is because it gives you a sense of criticism. It gives you a sense of perspectives of those who disagree. And I find it helpful. And sometimes I'll engage to the consternation of people on my team. But I do look at it, you know, maybe in the morning or at night before sleeping.

And it doesn't help you sleep. I want to talk in a minute about the big issue on Capitol Hill right now, which is the fight over pipeline reform. That is the kind of the side deal that went along with Manchus thing. But first, I want to talk about something that's lighting up probably your mentions a little bit this morning. We did an earlier segment on the New York Times investigation into congressional stock trading. You were mentioned in that report as not somebody who had done any stock trading yourself, but as somebody whose wife had traded some stocks that were under the jurisdiction of a committee that you served on. I think one of the companies was under investigation or potential investigation at the time. Give us your response to the New York Times article. As the New York Times reporter said, my wife has assets apart from before we were married, and it's almost like an index fund. It's a trust that's highly diversified.

And I think the New York Times reporter said it is like an index fund. So in my view, she doesn't make those trades. She doesn't know about the trades. It's an independent trust that's invested broadly. And I think that's why there's no conflict. Now, I support the banning stock act and will vote for whatever comes to the House. But I think my case is very different. I was going to go ahead.

Is it a blind trust? I mean, why not? Why not make it a blind trust? And is that what the best law would do or where the best law require particular just indexes that members of Congress? What is the solution here? I think there should be a prohibition on members trading. I think when you have a case like a spouse who's coming in with independent wealth, whose family is tied up with all of this, it doesn't just affect her, it affects her family, her sisters, others. I think that having

an ethics requirement that the person isn't trading themselves, that it's highly diversified, bans any conflicts. But I will vote for whatever, you know, I don't get to write the law, I'll vote for whatever comes there. But I do think that in our case, there is no conflict. I think, you know, I can't be saying beyond that there shouldn't be conflicts. I don't think I should be telling my wife's family how to restructure their finances other than to make sure that there is no conflict. Yeah, I was going to say it's really night and day between your case study and the example of someone like Paul Pelosi. There's a very clear distinction there. And I wanted to get into that a little bit. Just

one more question on this topic, because Ryan and I were discussing earlier how the New York Times investigation kind of carved out the Ways and Means Committee by sort of throwing its hands up in the air and saying, well, there's no realistic way to really look into this because the information is so general and so broad that it's very difficult to separate and to disentangle the variables. You know, who would have known what and how would that have influenced this, this, and that? As you mentioned, you think a blanket prohibition on members trading is important and safeguards for spouses are important. And what should diversification, one thing, of course, and blind trust or something to that extent, what is the risk so that people understand? Somebody who's sitting on ways and means, for example, you've been in Congress.

You kind of know the sort of information that comes your way, even if there is no investigation, even if you're not on a committee, you probably get information. What is the risk? In other words, why do you support these the blanket prohibition in the first place? Well, I think there's a risk to trust in terms of our people sitting on committees with jurisdiction and then taking into consideration their own stock portfolio. Of course, in my case, I have literally been one of the only voices voting against overspending on defense. I've taken on big pharma. I have taken on big oil. And so the

idea that a highly diversified indexed fund of my wife, which he had before marriage, would have any influence on me is refuted by actually my record. And I think there's no conflict. I will say this, though, and I say this supporting a stock ban. The big influence in Congress, in my view, is much more campaign finance. What's actually motivating people's policies is the fear of super PAC funding, is the fear of campaign contributions, is the money coming in from defense contractors, from insurance companies, from big pharma, from special interest lobbies. So I support this. I think it's better to have a stock trading ban than not. But we are kidding ourselves that that is really the issue that's

going to solve Congress to care about things like Medicare for All, a Green New Deal, free public college, increasing minimum wage. That is the issue of dark money in politics. Yeah, it just scratches the surface of that problem. And what I've heard from some members of Congress, and I'm curious if you've heard this as well, is that there's sort of an unspoken arrangement on Capitol Hill now where leadership says, look, we cannot politically vote for an increase in salaries. We will get crushed at the ballot box if we, you know, the 32nd ad writes itself, this person went and voted themselves a raise. But look, and the unspoken deal is, look, you're going to outperform the

market because of the access that you have to information. Is that unspoken arrangement kind of widely understood to be the thing that's in place and is what's causing the resistance? Because now it's like, oh, we're not going to get a raise. And also, we're going to lose out on this. No, because I don't think most people beat the market. I haven't looked at my wife. So I think usually being in an index fund way outperforms people picking individual stock. So I don't think that's what it is. I think we should have a vote. I mean, I was an early co-sponsor on the bill. I think there are different cases of complex cases. I mean, in terms of spouses and how that should be handled or

people who have independent careers. Let's say you could say someone who's a spouse has an independent career, but we can resolve those and there should be a bill and no bill is going to be perfect. I mean, it's not, but overall we should pass something. But I really don't think, honestly, that it is sort of greed that is holding this back. It may just be that people don't see the urgency of how much of an issue this is with the public. So on the question of NEPA reform, of pipeline reform, where do you stand on this kind of game of chicken that's going on between progressives and Manchin and House leadership? Should this be broken into a separate bill? And if it's not, would you vote down the CR, the continuing resolution, in order to stop this pipeline reform from going forward?

I would vote it down. And it's not just pipeline reform. It's a gutting of NEPA. I mean, you are basically saying you can't have any community have more claims after 150 days. Well, a lot of times it takes far more than 150 days for a community to figure out the negative impact. and help create fossil fuel infrastructure where communities, frontline communities had already won. We're winning 90 percent and now the executive branch is going to get to overrule judicial ruling. So this is not the permitting report we need. We can have a thoughtful conversation about how we build more clean energy, battery plants, solar and wind in this country. And there may be challenges in terms of the impact on that on endangered species. And then we can discuss what the tradeoff is between building green and negative impacts of doing that. And I am for looking at a healthy permitting reform to be able to build green, but I'm not for a permitting reform that's going to allow us to build more

fossil fuel infrastructure. This is not the permitting reform we need. What is your sense of where like-minded people on the House side might stand when it comes to voting against the CR in this case? Do you think that there would be a threat to the point where people have to come to the table? Do you get the sense that others are willing to vote against it? Well, I know that Bernie Sanders has said he would vote against it. I've said I would vote against it. I think other people have said they prefer a clean CR. I don't know how many people have come on record to say,

no, we won't vote for this, but they should, because the challenge is those who are not going to vote for a CR which is going to gut environmental laws, the challenge is why aren't we getting a clean CR? That's the problem of shutting down government. So I think we should be very clear that we will vote for a clean CR to keep government open. But if they don't send us a clean CR, that's where the blame lies for shutting down government. And I think we would then get a clean CR. Yeah, I think so. I don't think that Democratic leadership would shut down the

government over this heading into the midterms. Is that your sense? I just can't imagine them doing it. I can. And I think this is a case where the person who blinks first is the person who is not going to get their way. And look, Ron, you know this. I've been pretty reasonable in the progressive caucus. I'm the one who's worked with Senator Manchin to try to get a deal. I've been the person who said, let's get something done for infrastructure. I've been with chips. I've worked with Republicans and Democrats on that.

So I'm not one of the a bomb thrower, even though I'm very strongly progressive on Medicare for all and free college and $15 wage. And I'm saying this is the time that we have the leverage, that we should be very clear and bold and say we're not going to vote for it. And if 30, 40 members said that, I just don't think it's going to be part of the deal. And we can say we're open to a thoughtful approach

next Congress, but we're not going to be rushed into doing something that isn't going to end up increasing battery production, solar production, wind production, but is going to be increasing fossil fuel infrastructure. This is not the conversation that we need on permanent reform. I'm really interested to see what happens with this, because I think it is true that progressives have the leverage not to blink. And we'll see if they do it. We'll see. Congressman Kahn, I really appreciate you joining us on this first show. I appreciate it. I'm looking forward to your show and I really appreciate your voice.

Thank you so much, sir. Thank you. Hi, I'm Matt Stoller, author of Monopoly-focused newsletter, Big, and an antitrust policy analyst. Now, I have a great segment for you today on this big breakdown. I'm going to talk about credit cards and the payment system in the U.S., how we pay for things, which when you compare it to almost everywhere else in the world, pretty much sucks. And I'm going to explain how part of it has to do with those nifty reward points for credit cards and why they're a little bit of a scam. They're a means for credit card companies and banks to maintain market power and overcharge us, even though they look kind of cool when you're a consumer. Okay, so let's start with how you pay for things in

other countries. I'm going to pick a country that is not typically known for its high-tech sector, for good government, for its ease of use in paying for things. I'm going to pick the country of Brazil. Tropical paradise, but tends to be considered corrupt. However, in 2020, the Brazilian Central Bank did something remarkable. They introduced something called an app called Peaks, which lets anyone pay for things using a phone, basically for free. Now, it was a tremendous success. And today, Peaks is not only more heavily used than credit cards and debit cards in Brazil, but it's so popular that the president of Brazil, Bolsonaro, is running ads for his re-election campaign showcasing the app. Imagine

that. It's a political success story so powerful that the president of Brazil is saying, I got you a payments app, and that's why you should re-elect me. Beggars on the street actually are getting more money from Peaks than cash. It's that convenient and that cheap. Now, I picked Brazil, but it's not just Brazil. Kenya, for example, has had a mobile payment system that is better than the U.S. system called M-Pesa for almost 10 years. India has a real-time payment system that is as good or better than that in Brazil. And across Europe, the idea of writing a check or using a credit card with a signature is just plain weird. It's anachronistic. It's like living in the 1970s. But in the U.S., our system is slow. It's expensive. If you're a merchant, you have to buy, you know, a payment processing machine. So it's bulky. It's just bad. Okay. So this begs a

question. You know, we have high technology in this country. Why haven't we moved to a better system? Well, the reason, there's a number of reasons for it. One is we're just used to credit cards. We built that high-tech system, which was high-tech in the 60s. But more importantly, credit cards, this whole system in the U.S. is insanely profitable for banks and credit card issuers. Roughly four and a half times more lucrative for the lender than any other form of credit. And if you add up the two mainstreams of

revenue of credit cards, the industry generates about $257 billion in revenue every single year. That's $780 for each person in America, every man, woman, and child every year. And that is a lot of revenue to protect. Now, of course, it's not like they're just generating this revenue. They're getting this revenue from us. So it's not like, oh, this is a job creating thing. No, it's just kind of, they're getting a lot of revenue. Whereas in other countries, people don't have to pay for this because it's kind of done more efficiently by the government in many cases. Okay, so who protects this revenue stream and how does the American payment system work? Let's start with the basics. Credit cards are two products combined into one. The first is access to a global payments network that lets a customer and a merchant transact. You know these networks.

The payment network is super useful. It's MasterCard and Visa. You can pay at millions of establishments around the world. You buy online. You often don't have to convert to local currency. If you're a merchant, you can get paid by hundreds of millions of people. And for consumers, it seems mostly free. All you need is to carry around a piece of plastic. But it's not free. In America, merchants have to pay between 1.5% to 3.5% to middlemen on every single transaction, sometimes more actually. And that amounts to between $61 billion to $137 billion a year. And that amount of money makes everything that you buy a little bit more expensive. These swipe fees, which go not only to Visa, MasterCard, or American Express, that's the third one, but also to issuing banks and processors, are essentially a private sales tax. Now, Visa and MasterCard control 70% of the market. Last year, credit card networks raised their swipe fee prices to merchants by 24%.

And I say that at that amount, and that's important because it shows that they have immense market power. You can raise prices massively, even though you're already making money. It means that your customers really don't have other options. So where does this market power come from? Well, merchants, even big ones, cannot afford to not accept Visa and MasterCard. So they have to, in turn, accept whatever terms they are given by Visa and MasterCard. So they have to, in turn, accept whatever terms they are given by Visa and MasterCard to accept their cards. Now, one key to this market power are credit card rewards, which are the points you get when you spend money through a certain card. And I'll get back to why that makes it so that merchants have to accept these cards in a second. Okay, these rewards

recycle about $20 billion a year, mostly going to high-income customers and coming from the poor. So what's happening here is that the swipe fees that merchants pay, some of that money, not the majority of it, but some of that money is returned to customers in the form of reward fees. But actually, it's a recycling mechanism that taxes the poor and rewards the wealthy. This is a quote from the Boston Fed, which says that the lowest income households pay about $21 a year and the highest income households receive about $750 billion a year from the system. It's a wealth inequality generating machine. Now, naturally, the credit

card networks and banks, they keep a lot of the swipe fee money, but they pass enough of it back to us cardholders to make cardholders more loyal to our credit cards. Now, almost everyone would be better off if swipe fees were lower than they are, you know, if this whole transfer mechanism didn't happen. But that's not obvious to users of credit cards who see a direct cash benefit, reward benefit, and so that ensures that they will continue to use their card and therefore that merchants will have to accept their cards. Merchants are largely powerless in this arrangement. If you don't accept Visa or MasterCard, then a lot of customers just won't be able to pay for things at your store or your establishment. So Visa, American Express, and MasterCard even prevent competition between the three networks. They have what are called anti-steering provisions in their contracts with merchants.

So merchants are not even allowed to distinguish between different cards to their customers. It's why you don't see signs that say, use Visa and get a discount in local stores, or you don't see the credit card fee broken out separately. And this is, even though Visa's swipe fees are actually cheaper than American Express, they're not allowed to say that. Now, such a practice, these anti-steering provisions, should be illegal as antitrust case, a very important case, and after years of wrangling, in 2018, the Supreme Court basically gutted antitrust law and legalized this particular practice. Now, the second revenue stream for credit cards comes from credit products that allows a consumer to take out a short-term loan by carrying a monthly balance. There's value here. Sometimes you do need a short-term loan. It's convenient. But Americans overpay dramatically for the privilege, roughly $120 billion a year in total. Some of these, this overpayment is in the form of fees, like annual fees, fees for cash advances and balance transfers,

rebates, minimum finance charges, over-the-limit fees, late payment charges, and so on and so forth. In this part of the industry, as with swipe fees, there is also market power at work. That's what happens when people are overpaying. It's because there's a lack of competition. There's something wrong with the market. Now, since 2005, there have been six firms who control roughly two-thirds of total balances. JP Morgan, Citibank, Bank of America, Capital One, Discover, and American Express. Now, I'm going to show you a sort of complicated chart, but it's basically the profit margin for credit cards. And you see it has gone way up since 2011. According to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which is one of our bank regulators, from 2015 to 2019, the average assessed interest rate on credit cards increased by more than 20%.

So that's from 13.7% to 16.9%. And this was when the prime rate, which is linked to what the Federal Reserve gives to Wall Street in terms of what Wall Street can borrow out, went up by just 2.25%. So that's what happens when there's no competition for borrowing. Just the interest rate and fees go up. And how does this work? Well, there are a number of mechanisms that credit card banks use to block competition and get away with such a high margin. So first, some banks withhold information to credit bureaus about borrower repayments, which makes it hard for competitors to try to lure those customers away with better offers. So second, it's actually hard to get the price of credit card interest rates. You often have to apply to get that price. And

that means when you apply for a credit card, you get a credit check, which reduces your credit score. So shopping across offers just doesn't make sense. What happens is consumers look at rewards and annual fees, which is what credit card banks want them to look at instead of interest rates, which is what matters. So it's just hard to get the price. Now, third, it's hard to refinance a credit card balance and switch cards. And fourth, credit card banks use sort of a lot of hidden fees that are called junk fees. So, for example, $14 billion in late fee penalties alone in 2019, especially on people with worse credit. Now, I could go on and on about the problems here, the problems with credit cards and payments.

There's all sorts of surveillance issues and issues with who needs to be some MasterCard decide to kick out of the payment system, due process questions. But there are even monetary policy consequences. So for instance, when we hear in the news that the Federal Reserve is cutting or lowering interest rates,

what they don't say is that it is interest rates for Wall Street. You and I with credit cards do not actually get charged less money when interest rates go down. If there were competition, we would because there's a market for money. But there isn't competition. So the credit card banks can just sort of keep the prices high. Now, when interest rates go up, of course, they raise their interest rates. But they have market power.

Now, the good news here is that none of this is inevitable. It's all fixable. And there is actually policy movement. So Senator Dick Durbin, who's a Democrat, along with Republican Senator Roger Marshall, just released a bill to foster more competition among credit card networks. So that's on the merchant side. And the politics here is not unstoppable either. Every merchant in the country, from firms like Walmart and Amazon to the small merchants, are angry about excess fees that they must pay. So the politics here are not actually insurmountable. Also, bank regulators at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau are investigating these practices, and they're asking the six big credit card banks for information about potentially unfair practices. They're also asking the six big credit card banks for information about

potentially unfair practices. They're also using their authority to block junk fees by banks and considering ways to make it easier to switch credit cards. This is having good consequences. I found a story from Bankrate sort of showing that. And it's asking, will your credit card late fees go down despite inflation? And that's good. And that is actually the power of regulators when they work on our behalf. But most importantly, the best news is that the Federal Reserve itself, and I'm not a huge Fed fan, but this is very good, are actually trying to build a real-time payments network called FedNow. And FedNow is as close as the U.S. has gotten to something like Brazil's Peaks Network.

It is supposed to launch next year. It will enable cash transfers and bill pay that settles instantly. Now, having the government do FedNow makes a lot of sense because payments are a public service. If I hand you a $20 bill or write a check for $20, you get all $20. No special equipment needed. The government takes care of all the counterfeiting risk. That is a public system. So our payment system is in part a public system. One of the original purposes of the Federal Reserve was that it would actually do this. The central bank would actually do this for the high-tech payment technology of the time of 1914, which was checks. And it worked. After the Fed was created, checks cleared at what's called par,

which means that if you wrote a $20 check, you'd get $20. And before the Fed actually started check clearing, banks would take a fee for cashing a check from a different bank, very similar to a credit card network. Now, the fact that credit card companies and banks charge each of us $780 a year is a relic of 1960s technology, lacks competition policymaking over the last 40 years, and political corruption. Even now, big banks are lobbying to destroy bank regulators who are trying to stop them and systems like Fed Now. And this brings me finally to something that I think a lot of you are going to have questions about, which is the role of crypto. Now, a lot of the people in the crypto or fintech world look at the inefficiency of payments and say, we need to disrupt it with

new technologies and business models. But if that were so, we would see the same inefficiency all over the world and you would need technology to address it. But in reality, this inefficiency is increasingly just an American problem, not a worldwide one. And it doesn't have to do with a technology problem. It has to do with dominant firms maintaining their power using political influence and monopolization. Where there are functional effective governments, payment systems are quick and efficient. And where there aren't, payment systems are bad and clunky. So like it or not, this is a problem we actually have to fix through politics and government. Everyone else has, and there's no reason that America can't.

So thanks for watching this big breakdown on the Breaking Points channel. And if you'd like to know more about big business and how our economy really works, you can sign up below for my market power focus newsletter, Big, in the description. Thanks and have a good one. Over the years of making my true crime podcast, Hell and Gone, I've learned no town is too small for murder. I'm Katherine Townsend. I've heard from hundreds of people across the country

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This is Absolute Season 1, Taser Incorporated. I get right back there and it's bad. Listen to Absolute Season 1, Taser Incorporated on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Clayton English. I'm Greg Lott. And this is Season 2 of the War on Drugs podcast. Yes, sir. Last year, a lot of the problems of the drug war. This year, a lot of the biggest names in music and sports.

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