The Young Turks - Brace For Impact

Episode Date: April 20, 2022

Shutdowns in China are having a devastating impact on the global economy and inflation. In a massive victory, Amazon workers recently won a union at a warehouse in New York. So now the company is trying every trick in the union-busting playbook to throttle worker organizing at a second facility. Hosts: Ana Kasparian ***  The largest online progressive news show in the world. Hosted by Cenk Uygur and Ana Kasparian. LIVE weekdays 6-8 pm ET.  Help support our mission and get perks. Membership protects TYT's independence from corporate ownership and allows us to provide free live shows that speak truth to power for people around the world. See Perks: ▶ https://www.youtube.com/TheYoungTurks/join SUBSCRIBE on YOUTUBE: ☞ http://www.youtube.com/subscription_center?add_user=theyoungturks FACEBOOK: ☞ http://www.facebook.com/TheYoungTurks TWITTER: ☞ http://www.twitter.com/TheYoungTurks INSTAGRAM: ☞ http://www.instagram.com/TheYoungTurks TWITCH: ☞ http://www.twitch.com/tyt 👕 Merch: http://shoptyt.com ❤ Donate: http://www.tyt.com/go 🔗 Website: https://www.tyt.com 📱App: http://www.tyt.com/app 📬 Newsletters: https://www.tyt.com/newsletters/ If you want to watch more videos from TYT, consider subscribing to other channels in our network: The Damage Report ▶ https://www.youtube.com/thedamagereport TYT Sports ▶ https://www.youtube.com/tytsports The Conversation ▶ https://www.youtube.com/tytconversation Rebel HQ ▶ https://www.youtube.com/rebelhq TYT Investigates ▶ https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCwNJt9PYyN1uyw2XhNIQMMA #TYT #TheYoungTurks #BreakingNews https://youtu.be/BQa-8fvbf-8 https://youtu.be/-CiptujSBWA https://youtu.be/n_bwNnEQV5I https://youtu.be/tXZ0g0jqhCs https://youtu.be/G5aAhXDWZBI https://youtu.be/gRPUnJwDXDo https://youtu.be/44QV6INibUQ https://youtu.be/CH8JUy-_0E0 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You're listening to The Young Turks, the online news show. Make sure to follow and rate our show with not one, not two, not three, not four, but five stars. You're awesome. Thank you. What's up, everyone, welcome to TYT, I'm your host, Anna Kasparian, and I got to be honest, it's 420. It's an awesome Wednesday. We have a rundown that's packed with incredible stories. In fact, the second hour is just one banger story after the next. I can't wait.

John Iderola, of course, as always, will be joining me since it is Wednesday. And we've got some big news coming from the Office of Bernie Sanders. So we'll give you that breaking news story a little later. We'll also talk a little bit about Donald Trump angrily walking out of an interview with Pierce Morgan. What set him off this time? We'll talk about that. Also in the first hour, I want to focus primarily on economy-related news. In fact, we're going to have a fantastic guest on Nomi Prins, who actually used to be a partner over at Goldman Sachs. And then she decided to quit and become a whistleblower and journalist. She's also an incredible author.

So she's going to talk to us a little bit about what's currently transpiring in the economy, what the Federal Reserve is up to, the insider trading scandal that transpired within the Federal Reserve. And she'll also talk to us about the impact of these private equity firms becoming more and more empowered and less and less regulated and the kind of impact that has on our economy as well. But as always, as I always motivate you to do or encourage you to do, please like and share the stream. It's a great way to help support the show and the message that we're trying to put out there. Without further ado, let's get to our big economic update. 25 million people confined to their homes, manufacturing grinding to a halt with little

moving in and out of the largest container port in the world. Any business that produces physical goods is being disrupted by what's happening in China. Nothing has emphasized the fragility of of the global economy more than the COVID era. And while inflation seems to be the top subject on most of these economic shows or an economic reporting, fact of the matter is there seems to be very little attention to the fact that we rely heavily on manufacturing in China for our goods here in the United States. And guess what? Huge portions of that country are currently on lockdown in response to the Omicron coronavirus

variant. So I want to give you the details on that. Talk a little bit about the ramifications and what we should be considering for the future. So as CNN business reported, most alarming is the indefinite lockdown in Shanghai, a city of 25 million and one of China's premier manufacturing and export hubs. The quarantines have led to food shortages, inability to access medical care, and even reported pet killings. They've also left the largest port in the world understaffed. So China has a zero COVID policy. They take coronavirus much more seriously than pretty much any other country, certainly more seriously than the United States has. But I would argue that they're on an extreme, you know, level

that I would not be an advocate for in any other country, in any other place in the world, especially because of the impact it's having on the people of China, the lack of access to food as a result of this. There is this mass effort by the government to send food to individuals in the country as they're experiencing these lockdowns, but there have been some reports showing what they're receiving and it's not nearly enough for them to survive on, really. And so China's recent pandemic response is likely to cost at least $46 billion. in lost economic output per month or 3.1% of GDP, and that's according to research from

the Chinese University of Hong Kong. But it's one thing to discuss the impact that it's having in China, which is dire, which is terrible. Remember, we're also connected. We're all interconnected as a result of this global economy. And so when we're discussing inflation, It's really important to consider that the domestic policies in countries that we rely on heavily for manufacturing will have a ripple effect on our own economy. So the port of Shanghai, for instance, which handled over 20% of Chinese freight traffic in 2021, is essentially at a standstill. Food supplies stuck in shipping containers without access to refrigeration are rotting. Incoming cargo is now stuck at Shanghai Marine terminals for an average of eight days before it's transported elsewhere, which is a 75% increase since the recent round of lockdowns

began. And more than 90% of trucks supporting import and export deliveries, by the way, are currently out of action. They are not operating as we speak. And there are many major companies that we tend to think of as American, but they do a lot of their manufacturing in China. For instance, Sony and Apple supplier plants in and around Shanghai are idle. Quanta, the world's biggest contract notebook manufacturer and a MacBook maker, has stopped production entirely. The plant accounts for about 20% of Quanta's notebook production capacity, and the company previously estimated it would ship 72 million units this year. Tesla previously shuttered. It's Shanghai Gigafactory, which produced about 2,000 electric cars per day. Now, they are

in the process of reopening. There's been a significant amount of pressure to start opening up these factories and these warehouses again and get these workers back in action. But what's really devastating to the workers in China is that they have to work in conditions that are actually even worse than the conditions that we've come to learn about in, you know, previous years, because the government is still trying to implement this zero COVID policy. So what does it look like to be a worker in China that has to undergo lockdowns and quarantines, but is also pressure to go back to work? Well, let's take a quick look at that. Fueling pressure, the government asking businesses to restart operations, many creating job side bubbles where workers sleep in offices for weeks.

Truck drivers subjected to daily testing stuck at checkpoints for days. China's lockdown could lead to an unprecedented tsunami of cargo entering our country in the coming months. It would look a lot like last fall, a major traffic jam at our nation's ports. And I want to focus a little bit on what is happening to Tesla workers specifically, because as I mentioned, they're starting to open back up. They're starting to get the workers to come back to work. But the conditions are pretty terrible. So Tesla workers at the automakers facility in Shanghai will be required to sleep on the factory floor

as Tesla restarts production after a three-week shutdown. The location will be operating as a closed loop system in order to avoid further shutdowns amid China's zero tolerance policy for COVID-19 infections. And so will they be provided with anything to make sleeping on the factory floor a little more comfortable? Well, Tesla will provide workers with a sleeping bag and mattress and set aside a portion of the factory floor to be used as sleeping accommodations. Workers will also be expected to work 12 hours a day with one day off every six days,

Bloomberg reported. Previously, the employees would work eight hours shifts with four days on and two days off. So not only are they being forced to sleep on the factory floor, they're being forced to go back to work. They're also being forced to overwork, I'm guessing, to make up for the fact that they've been doing these lockdowns and they've been quarantining. This is not a system that I'm in any way in favor of. So I feel terrible for the workers in China. I mean, we should have been already feeling terrible for the workers in China,

because the whole reason why most of our manufacturing takes place in countries like China is so these corporations can take advantage of cheap labor. And they could take advantage of these abusive environments for workers. At the same time, though, that also has a ripple effect on our own economy. and the global economy, because again, if we're relying on China to make these products and they're shutting down as a result of COVID, that means we're not going to have the supply that we typically would have of the various products that are manufactured in these countries, countries like China. And so what will the outcome of all of this be?

Well, American economic leaders believe decoupling is already underway. Oak Tree co-founder Howard Marks wrote in a late, wrote in the late March, wrote in a memo in late March, by the way, that the pendulum has swung back toward local sourcing and away from globalization, Black Rock chairman Larry Fink echoed the sentiment in a letter to the company's shareholders. The Russian invasion of Ukraine, he wrote, has put an end to globalization we have experienced over the last three decades. Now, I would venture to say that the statements coming from executives or anyone working at places like Black Rock should be taken with a grain of salt. because they act as though globalization and essentially outsourcing American jobs to various

companies, or various countries, which just, you know, it just happened. It was just like a natural thing that happened. There were no economic forces behind those decisions, when in reality, all you have to do is take a step back and see why these jobs were shipped to other countries in the first place. Again, it was all about maximizing profit for these corporations. It was all about ensuring that they were able to manufacture these products as cheaply as possible. And in order to do that, you would need to rely on a workforce that is underpaid, that is not unionized, that has really no say over their working conditions.

And what better place to do that than China? And the workers have been dealing with this kind of treatment for quite some time. Globalization isn't something that they just out of nowhere decided to do and there was no force behind it. There were actual motivations behind it, and the motivation was to maximize profit. And to be quite frank, that motivation has led to the precarious situation that we're experiencing now with inflation. Yes, the Russian invasion into Ukraine has a lot to do with this as well, especially when it comes to things like oil prices, the amount of money we're paying at the pump.

When we talk about inflation, there are various different factors at play, and I think it's important to differentiate those factors. When we talk about the housing market and the inflation we're seeing there, that is very much the result of the Federal Reserve and its quantitative policy, it's quantitative easing policy where it essentially provided liquidity to banks, and more importantly, private equity firms that decided to invest that money into residential real estate, thus pricing ordinary people out of the market. That's why we see inflation in the housing market.

When it comes to inflation in other areas, whether it be new and used cars, electronics, things like that, we really do need to consider the fragility of the global economy, the fragility of having to rely on other countries to manufacture our goods, and more importantly, understanding why those goods are being manufactured in other countries. It's specifically done to maximize profits, and what happens to these corporations? Do they then turn around and say, listen, we've made. poor decisions and so we're going to take a hit for this, we're going to take a loss. No, I mean, they get to raise their prices on the limited supply.

And when it comes to basic necessities, Americans are either going to shell out an insane amount of money to afford those necessities or they're not going to be able to afford them. And that's the situation we're in. When we hear about inflation, you know, yes, domestic policy has a lot to do with it, emboldening and empowering these corporations to constantly go after profit seeking over the best interests of the American people is something that the government has done time and time again, and they need to take responsibility for that, for sure. But to say that this is the end of globalization,

I'm not buying it. Because in order for this to be the end, you need to understand what motivated globalization in the first place, profits. And as long as we're living under this economic system that always prioritizes profits over people, globalization ain't going nowhere. They're always going to look for the cheapest labor. They're always going to look to either do away with or chip away labor rights here in the United States or find cheap labor elsewhere. Anyway, I want to talk about this in more detail in a little bit. Nomi Prince will be joining me to talk about not just the global economy,

but what's been going on with the Federal Reserve here in the United States. Before we get to that though, I did want to read a few member comments, since I'm not going to be able to do that during this next break. Jim writes in in our member section and says it's all about CEO's fiduciary responsibility to their shareholders. And you're absolutely right about that. When we talk about this financial system, when we talk about capitalism and what the whole point of capitalism is, it's about maximizing profits. And the system that we're living under literally states that these companies have a legal responsibility to return as much on investment to their shareholders, right? And what is that going to do?

It's going to put workers at a disadvantage here in the United States. It's going to put workers at a disadvantage across the globe, because again, they're going to be looking for cheap labor. Kabuki Dragon says, it's noon, it's noon here on Maui. I'm very jealous, I got to say. Going to listen today while I work in my garden on this 420, tending to the plants that help me to tolerate this S show of a world. Happy holidays, TYT fam.

I'm so jealous of you. That sounds lovely. I hope you're having a great time. Terry says, make Elon sleep on the factory floor since he likes not owning a home. Jim says anybody who has ever been to Foxcon knows what a slave labor camp looks like. Exactly, I remember covering that story and also discussing the nets that they had set up around that factory because people were literally jumping to their deaths because the working conditions were so terrible. So this is the reality of the system that we're dealing with. And it's important to identify that, especially since you're not going to get that kind of perspective in most of the corporate media or any of the corporate media.

special thanks to our new YouTube members, including Julie, who happens to work here. So Julie, thank you for being a member. Deanne Loso and Carol Katz. You guys are amazing. Thank you for supporting the show. Stick around because when we come back from the break, one of my favorite people, Nomi Prins, will be joining me to talk about the economy, what's going on with the Federal Reserve, and, by the way, private equity firms.

That's an important part of the discussion as well. Stick around. Welcome back to TYT, like and share the stream if you're watching us on YouTube. Become a member by going to TYT.com slash join, or if you are watching us on YouTube, you can click on that join button and become a member. You get all sorts of exclusive members only perks, including the bonus episode, which I'm really looking forward to today with John Iderola. So don't miss it if you are a member. And if you're not one, as I said, you can become one to not only help support this show and keep us independent, but also to get all sorts of perks that come along with membership. All right.

Well, I'm very excited for the discussion that we're about to have because someone I genuinely, deeply respect and absolutely love talking to. Nomi Prince is here. Nomi Prins is a former partner with Goldman Sachs who actually quit her career on Wall Street to become a journalist and a bit of a whistleblower. She's the author of several incredible books, including all the president's bankers and collusion, how the central bankers or how the central banks rigged the world. She also has an upcoming book that I'm looking forward to reading, Permanent Distortion, How Financial Markets Abandoned the Real Economy Forever. Nomi, thank you so much for joining. us.

Thank you so much, Anna. It's great to see you again. It's so good to see you. I know you've been busy working on your latest book. Very excited. It's coming out October 11th of 2022, so I'm very excited to read that. And you recently testified before the Senate Budget Committee, and I want to hear more about that because you were specifically talking about something that's been catching everyone's

attention, which is private equity firms, the amount of power they have, and more importantly, More importantly, the impact they've had on the housing market. So talk to me a little bit about what you've been noticing with these private equity firms and the type of impact they've had on both the economy and the day-to-day lives of ordinary Americans. Yeah, so the testimony I gave connected what private equity is doing with companies like BlackRock, which basically own so many assets, so much of people's money, and also work with private equity firms to basically buy up all of things. Components of companies, of course, through stock, as well as components of the housing market. As we've seen, housing prices have gone crazy high in the last couple years.

And often, a lot of these houses are not bought by actual real people applying for actual real mortgages. They're bought up by sort of consortiums of private equity companies that are components and funded by some of the assets of management companies like Black Rock to effectively bid up and buy up with leveraged money because money is so cheap and so easily available to these companies, housing, projects, homes without even going into them, without even potentially living in them. And that's increased the price for real people and actually kept them out of markets and basically being able to buy homes for themselves and their families. It's also made rents go sky high because they're basically cornering a portion of the housing market with

actually using it, in which case they can go about and raise rent sky high, which then increase the rents around those particular buys. So it's an incredibly knock on and circular effect. It's fed by cheap money. It's leveraged and it's a really partnership between the private equity firms doing it and the large asset management companies that can work with them. So we've talked about this on the show before, but I want to back up a little bit for anyone who might not be familiar with this story. I think it's really important to understand how the system works. So when you mentioned cheap money, talk to talk to me a little bit about what that means. Where do they get the cheap money from? And also what does it mean to be leveraged?

What does leveraged money mean? So leverage is like borrowing way more times than you need in order to make basically bets. It's the equivalent of like you know, you go into say a casino and you've got $10 in your pocket, and you ask 10 other people for $100 in total, but you promise each of them you can pay them back with 10 in case you lose all that money, but you only

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For a limited time, get 15% off your entire first order at happy mammoth.com with code next chapter at checkout. Visit happy mammoth.com today and get your old self back naturally. Leverage of basically 10 to 1. The reason I talk about cheap money and how these firms, and particularly the big banks and big asset managers, can basically borrow money and leverage it in this way multiple times against whatever they are buying is because rates have been so very low. Now, of course, in the news, there's all this talk about how the Fed is going to raise rates to fight inflation, even though it didn't even notice inflation was a thing until everybody

else did. And they did raise rates by 25 basis points, a quarter of 1% in March. But the point being that we are still in an environment where the cost of money, particularly to the financial industry, Wall Street, is very, very cheap. They don't pay what real people pay for mortgages. They don't pay what real people pay for interest rates on credit cards. They have access to money very, very cheaply, and they sort of dole it out to each other. And in that way, they can create a lot of money out of nothing based on it being cheaply

available and real ordinary people cannot. And what that does is it inflates the price of everything more than it would otherwise be inflated, which again, hurts ordinary people on a one to one basis because real people don't leverage their lives in that way. Exactly. And I mean, you know, when inflation started, and you're absolutely right, the Federal Reserve kept repeating that it was just transitory. It's temporary. Don't worry. It's because of supply chain disruptions. Didn't want to take responsibility for its role in inflation. But talk a little bit about how, you know, you've been writing and speaking quite a bit about quantitative easing. And so that has played a role in the inflation that, we're experiencing, certainly in the housing market. And now all of a sudden we're hearing about rising interest rates. Can you talk a little bit about why the Federal Reserve felt the need to provide, as they say, liquidity to big banks and to financial markets? What was the

reasoning or excuse that they gave to the American people? Yeah, that's an excellent question. Quantitative easing, just to break the words down, is just a wonky way of saying making money cheap for the big players in the markets. But basically, Basically, it was done in two main chunks. One was after the financial crisis of 2008, where the Fed came in and basically cut interest rates to zero. Again, mostly that 0% availability was to the big banks and Wall Street. What they also did was bought about $4.5 trillion worth of bonds, of treasury bonds, of mortgage bonds from the market through the fabrication of effectively cheap or just created money.

It wasn't money that was produced, it wasn't money that was connected to the real economy. So that was one way of inflating the type of money that was available at a cheap level to the system, right? And then the second time they went and did this, the excuse was, well, we just had a pandemic. It was in the beginning of 2020. Let's just like blow up our balance sheet, i.e. create another four and a half trillion dollars. So double in a much shorter period of time what it had created in the wake of the financial crisis in order to quote ostensibly help the economy. Now the reality is that the money was not all available to the real economy, did not go into building the real economy, a teeny teeny bit of it around the edges, you know, did go into

some of the programs that did help people and small businesses survive during the worst parts of the pandemic enclosures. But it was very, very tiny compared to this this leverage and this backing to debt and to the types of money that went to Wall Street and ultimately went into the stock markets. And so this was all under the guise of quantitative easing or basically not just reducing interest rates, but creating money in order to buy debt and take it out of the market and let market players use that money to basically leverage themselves and speculate. The thing that kind of confuses me about this is, as you mentioned, after 2008, after that

economic collapse. You really see the Federal Reserve engage in this behavior with quantitative easing. And up until now, there hadn't really been much inflation. What triggered the inflation that we're experiencing at this moment? Like, why did it all just kind of hit us at once? Yeah, it's a really good question. And it's important just to step back and look at this, this whole distortion, or what I call permanent distortion now, between the markets and that availability of this excess abundance of cheap money relative to the real economy. What happened was two things. When the Fed created money effectively cheaply, and that money went into a lot of the financial markets, it inflated something called the money supply. Basically, money

supply is what people buy and sell, the money they use, bank accounts, etc. But it's also the reserves that are at the Federal Reserve that banks effectively give the Fed their their debt, their assets, and the Fed gives them money, no strings attached, and they can use that money to do other things with. That creates an inflation of money, this this bubble of money. Now separately to that, we had real problems in, well, right now we're seeing in oil and commodities, in food, in supply chains. And that was another side of inflation that was happening in the real economy. So what you had was two things going on. And this is why the numbers have gotten so bad and why CPI was at eight and a half percent.

in the last reading because the real economy is dealing with two things. It's dealing with supply chain like real economic problems, real transportation problems, real excess costs of everything from putting gas in your car to getting products from one country to another to your supermarket. So there's a lot of things going on in terms of supply chains and that's a whole other detailed topic, but that's the generality of it. But in addition, what's happening is this excess money is finding these types of assets, it's finding oil, it's finding some of the food, and it's basically going

in and betting on it in a way that exacerbates the inflation that's real that is created because of supply chains and because of the demand for certain products that came out of the awakening of the economy after the pandemic. So there's two levels of this inflation, and both of them have been inflated to use inflation twice by this excess money, one by speculation, and one by the fact that it's been so cheap and that's been exacerbated by the supply chains. And now it's a bigger thing. And the Fed, as you mentioned before, has just literally not recognized its role in inflating this abundance of money that's available to the biggest market players while real inflation, the real economy is trying to scrounge to find products and get

products from A to B and pay for it. And so both of those two things are going on at the same same time, which is why we're hearing and talking about it so much more now. So the Federal Reserve is now slowly increasing interest rates. But, you know, I heard a prediction of yours recently during an interview that you had. And I think that your prediction is accurate. You claim that, listen, I mean, they're going to maybe raise interest rates two, maybe three times. But as soon as they notice the impact that it's having on the stock market, for instance, they're probably going to go back to the same old, same old. Why do you think that's the case? And what kind of impact do you think that's going to have

in the long term? the case that the Fed talks kind of about, you know, a hawkish kind of stance. And there's been a lot of predictions in the general market that take that at face value, which is that we're going to have six or seven increases, that the Fed's going to really reduce its book. This is almost $9 trillion of money it's created quite quickly. And that this is going to be some way of stabilizing what is a combination of us all this money that's really gone into inflating the markets as well as the real inflation that's happening in the overall economy. The reality is the Fed watches markets. It has a dual mandate. And I say this a lot. And it just continues to just

be obvious from the events that ultimately take place, which is that it's supposed to mandate price stability. And that's why it talks about inflation. It has a 2% band that it tries to target, obviously, or way above that. So, you know, not did that really well. And then also, it's supposed to have a full employment target, right? And we're a bit closer to that with some of the jobs coming back. But of course, a lot of people not choosing to work in this particular economy because of a host of other reasons. So anyway, that's the actual official mandate, that dual mandate. The third thing that I think they focus on are the markets. Now, if you look at just one little example, which is Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell, he has a lot of his

own money. It depends, the estimates put it anywhere between $25 and $60 million, depending on what's going on with the markets, where it is, et cetera, with companies like BlackRock, who also was given basically a no-bit opportunity to manage the Fed's book, which is effectively, you know, this quantitative easing money that was fabricated out of nowhere. So because there's a lot of synergy between the people that run the Fed, Congress that owns a lot of the stock market, the companies that they choose to basically manage some of this money on behalf of themselves, and the market itself and Wall Street, you know, throw all that together. And the Fed doesn't really have a strong impetus to just mess all that up by making the cost of money really, really high. And this has

been what we've seen since the financial crisis of 2008. They will raise rates a little bit. They'll usually say they're going to raise rates or forecast they're going to raise rates by more than they actually do. So they got some room to kind of step back and look at, quote, the data. What's the data? Well, the economy is going to slow down. because inflation is so high and people don't have all this excess money that some of the Wall Street players have in like their real life. You know, because we have a war going on in the Ukraine because we have incredible inflation around the world. Because we have more disruptions and supply chains now in China with another bout of closures. Because all these reasons that effectively are going to create a situation where it's going to be obvious that the economy is not growing as fast as some of those inflation numbers say.

And the Fed's going to be able to say, look, we've got all these other reasons not to do as much as we were going to do. We're just going to keep things as close to what they are as possible. We'll raise rates a bit. I mean, it's not like they're going to stop. They're still going to raise rates, I think, in May and maybe another time throughout the year. But they're going to pedal back a lot from the sort of forecast that they promoted. Yeah, I mean, you touched on, I think, the most important element to this entire system, which is the conflict of interest, where you have. the head of the Federal Reserve personally invested in the market to the tune of tens of millions

of dollars. And so if increasing interest rates is going to have an impact on his stock portfolio, is that going to inform his decision making? I would venture to say yes. And to that point, Nomi, you know, this is a little bit of an outdated story, but I've been really wanting to talk to you about it. There was a huge insider trading scandal with the Federal Reserve. We've been talking about insider trading within Congress, but now we're talking about the federal reserve as well. Can you get the audience up to speed on what happened and the resignations that followed as a result? Yeah, so I mean, basically in the wake of COVID, as the Fed was creating $4.5 trillion out of nowhere in a very short period of time, which is really kind of a magical thing

to be able to do there, no limitations in terms of how much the Fed can create or where that money goes or strings attached to it or anything. There's just sort of talk around what it's supposed to be doing to fight emergencies and so forth. And in this process, a number of Fed officials, one of whom resigned, were effectively involved in some of the specific areas that were most helped by this abundance of money. And so, and so was Congress. And so, and And there's ongoing investigations in terms of a lot of Congress people that had to do with the timing specifically of not just trading or sort of moving their portfolios around relative to just the general creation of this extra money that was also streaming into stock markets

generally, but also stocks that could have been impacted by COVID protocol or by COVID emergency funding. And so it's a fine line. In general, Congress, I think, should not be trading anything when they're doing the public's business. I mean, they can have old potentially investments coming in. But this was not the situation with what was going on. It was the appearance and the actuality of trading and investing while these emergency amounts of money were being created and going into other areas and therefore profiting from them. And to this day, it's still okay to do that. It's insane. Absolutely insane.

The head of the Fed, Chairman Powell did suggest that it would be a good idea for, you know, people, the Fed not to basically do this. But there was no, you know, as he was. But, but, you know, whether it's active or passive, and this is, this is, this is, is kind of the irritation with this entire conflict of interest is that it's not about, oh, I'm about to sign a bill. Why just survive back to school when you can thrive by creating a space that does it all for you, no matter the size. Whether you're taking over your parents' basement or moving to campus, IKEA has hundreds

of design ideas and affordable options to complement any budget. After all, you're in your small space era. It's time to own it. Shop now at IKEA.ca. I'm about to deliver a bill on the floor and I'm also positioned in this company and at the end I'm going to like cash out because I know this bill is going to, you know, sort of be passed or not or it's going to be talked about or not. And I'll make money out of it. It's not about that. It's about the fact that in general, there's a public obligation and there's a private investment side.

And when you have a public obligation, which, you know, you've been voted to do. And in the case of the Fed, Jerome Powell and Fed members aren't voted by people. They're voted by effectively themselves and substantiated by Congress. But they're still involved in doing, quote, the public's business. And that should not be private investing on the back of money you can create because the actual public can't go around and say, all right, well, we want to just create, you know, a few trillion dollars. of our own to use to invest in the markets. So corporate stock buybacks were already a problem prior to the pandemic. And then, you know, more access to that cheap money, I think put that whole issue on overdrive.

And now we're seeing various companies, various banks, just be very transparent about how much they plan on even increasing their corporate stock buybacks. What kind of impact does that have on the stock market and the inflation of assets? Because I think it's important for ordinary Americans who might actually have the means. Very few of them do relative to the wealthy have the means to invest their money. But some of these investments are incredibly risky when you really take into consideration how inflated they might be as a result of corporate stock buybacks, as opposed to, you know, the stock or the shares going up in value because of, you know,

supply and demand and all of that. You know, it's all disconnected from what we generally think of as, you know, economic forces. Yeah, that's a good question. And when I talk about that, that distortion, that permanent distortion between the real economy and the markets, you know, what you're referring to at the end of what you just said is, is the real economy, which which should be reflected in the actual values of stock prices and isn't when you have an abundance of cheap money going in and chasing some of those stocks. It's not to say their own companies that that should be valued as high as they are based on supply and demand, based on their products, based on their innovation. But what it does, having share buybacks

be sort of your modus operandi for inflating your own stock effectively because it's cheaper to borrow money at the levels that the Fed has prevailing right now and to use that money to buy stock to push your stock up. And also money flows into stock that's inflating. So if a if a company launches a big share buyback program because they borrow money in order to do that, it had two things happen. One, they potentially get more into debt. That could or could not be a problem depending on the company, but that's just a potential weakness there. But also money chases money, right? And money doesn't really care where money comes from, from once it gets into a market environment.

And that's where the sort of stock inflation can come up. A share buyback is followed by other people, investors, small investors to Wall Street looking at it and saying, okay, well, if they're buying shares, shares are going to go up, we'll go in and buy shares. They'll go up further because you have all this money flowing into those companies that are doing that. But they're not necessarily chasing their own value.

So it creates this distorted effect between real and sort of transparent value of a company, And the value that it gets because it has this money sort of chasing its stock price up. And buybacks are one sort of area from which that money comes. Well, unfortunately, we're running out of time and we have to wrap up soon. But I do want to ask one more question, which is for people who want to get involved, who want to organize, who want to look to policy solutions for much of what we're talking about today, where would you direct their attention? Where should the focus be in terms of regulating the system in the very least to maybe do away with this distortion?

Yeah, so one thing, and I mentioned it in my testimony, and it does have to do with the ordinary investor versus the sort of leveraged Wall Street using lots of cheap money types of flow that's been going on, which is which is shareholder rights. And one of the things that I had mentioned was a company like BlackRock that owns $10 trillion worth of assets or other people's money is effectively able to vote those shares. That means that they can basically push corporate policy, which means they can push what corporates do, corporations do, and how they do it, and how that impacts their workers and their other kinds of employees and a whole chain of other areas. Whereas actual individual people, if you buy a fund or you invest. of retirement amount of money in some of these ETS exchange traded funds as they're called with BlackRock or other big companies, you don't have that right that they just took. So they're basically using your money to impose their opinion on the corporations that your money is going towards through them. So one thing that I think is really important is for anybody

that's invested in any way in the market, whether it's, you know, extra money, it's your retirement, your retirement 401k whatever is to realize that that money is not is actually getting negatively impacted by this distortion because it's going to help the big players become more powerful and influential over corporate policies so that's one thing I think in general you know where do you go I mean there's so many things that need to to be changed in the system to to make it less distorted I don't see that happening which is why I call it a permanent distortion there's There's too much money in there that's been fabricated from nothing over too long a period of time. But the Fed should have limitations on what it can create, not just how it fixes interest rates,

but what it buys, how much it buys, how quickly it creates money and the accountability that it doesn't have in terms of what happens to that money, because that's really important. $9 trillion is a substantial chunk or equivalent to a substantial chunk almost half of our GDP. And this is not just the Fed, this is central banks around the world. So so I think all of those things are absolutely necessary to be changed. There's more, but to pay attention to in the real economy or if you are a smaller or sort of other form of participant in the markets are affected by them, which we all are. Nomi Prins, absolute pleasure to speak with you.

Thank you for being so generous with your time. Everyone please check out her work. She has, by the way, one of my favorite things to do is to just go on YouTube and look up anything that you've done in terms of interviews, talks. Please check that out. Also, her upcoming book is Permanent Distortion, How Financial Markets Abandoned the Real Economy Forever. That is due to come out October 11th of this year. And while you're waiting for that to be released, please check out all the president's bankers and collusion. The other two books that were published by Nomi Prince. Nomi, thank you again. I really appreciate it. Thank you so much, Anna. All right, everyone stick around. We're going to take a brief break. And when we come back, an update on what Amazon is up to in regard to preventing workers from organizing.

We'll be right back. Welcome back to the show, I want to get right into our next story, an update on what Amazon is up to now that one of their warehouses successfully unionized. Amazon, all right, Amazon is doing its best to squash any organizing effort among its workers in various facilities because, as you can imagine, the fact that one of their warehouses in New York, JFK8, as it's known, Successfully unionized, and that has encouraged workers at other facilities to organize and do the same. Now, JFK8 unionized with their own union, and it was such a success story, such an inspiring story that I was hoping that it would motivate other workers. But it turns out that Amazon is looking for ways to squash that effort. So let's specifically talk about one of the sorting facilities in Staten Island, known as LDJ5. The workers there are currently organizing to form a union.

And why are they doing it? Well, it's a little different from JFK8, where they were dealing with long, grueling shifts. The workers at the sorting facility are asking for more hours. They want to make sure that they get benefits, which they certainly deserve. And they've noticed that they're not getting full-time work in an effort to prevent them from getting the benefits that they're seeking. So one of the organizers over at JFK-8 said this. You have a lot of part-time workers here who want to be full-time workers, and they put in applications to transfer to full-time. But the bosses here, instead of letting them do that, they have flooded the warehouse with part-time workers to not have to give them the sort of meager benefits that exist for full-time workers.

And guys, we see this happening all across our economy with various companies. They'll schedule their workers to work just the right amount of hours. So they don't trigger any type of regulation that indicates that they would have to provide benefits for these workers. Now, LDJ5 employees also want voluntary extra time and 20 minute, or I'm sorry, yes, 20 minute breaks up from 15 minute breaks, which, listen, the fact that they have to fight so aggressively for an additional five minutes to take a break, tells you everything you need to know about the importance of organizing your workplace to ensure that workers have some power over their working conditions and the decisions that are made about those working conditions. But Amazon, of course, is trying to fight them tooth and nail. The company has clamped down

on union activity in recent days at LDJ5 by repeatedly dismantling a pro-union banner in the break room, disciplining a leader of the unionization effort at LDJ5 for her organizing activity on the warehouse floor and also confiscating pro-union literature. Very similar to what we saw at other Amazon facilities. Amazon has also continued to hold, this shouldn't shock you, daily mandatory anti-union meetings and one-on-ones at LDJ5. And ALU organizers say that the company has hired anti-union consultants. which is a favorite tactic with these major corporations who typically work as independent contractors as full-time employees with blue badges that allow them to blend in better with workers in the warehouse. So they've got some moles running around, right? Individuals that are

posing as workers. By the way, the anti-union consultants who are third-party contractors getting full-time work to crush the unionizing effort tells you everything you need to know about what the executives over at Amazon are prioritizing. In fact, one worker at this sorting facility said this. All these union busters that were there to union bust 8,000 workers at JFK8 have walked across the street and are in our little building of 1,600 people. They're really fighting us and they're playing really dirty. Now, Amazon has spent a whopping $4.3 million on their union busting efforts in 2021 alone.

And so a 2020 analysis by the Economic Policy Institute found that only a few employers have spent more than $1 million on anti-union consultants. And it's typically taken several years to rack up such a bill. Any spending in the hundreds of thousands of dollars is on the highest. end, none of the companies in EPA's analysis came close to spending as much as Amazon has in such a short period of time. And their tactics are incredibly gross. For instance, Amazon has planned an internal messaging app. We've talked about this on the show before that would block workers from using words or phrases like union, pay raises, living wage, or representation. And that's according to documents that were leaked to the intercept. This was a story that was originally reported by Ken Clippenstein over at The Intercept.

Also, Amazon's desperate union busting sometimes ends up having the opposite effect, which I love to see. I love to see it backfire. For instance, one of the workers, Louis Leon, I'm sorry, Louis Leon is the reporter over at Labor Notes that reported about Kathleen Cole. She got involved with the unionization effort at LDJ5 after she was compelled to attend a captive audience meeting, she's quoted as saying, to be honest with you, if they were fair and neutral in these meetings, I probably never would have gotten involved. So God, I'd love to see that effect. But I also want to talk a little bit about where the public is when it comes to unionizing. And when I say the public, I'm not just talking about workers at Amazon.

I'm talking about Americans in general, all these different demographics, all these different political ideologies. Where do they stand on organizing your workplace, unionizing your workplace? Well, let's take a look at this graphic. I love to see it. This is from more perfect union. They find that 75% of Americans say Amazon workers need a union. Love to see it. 75% of recent Amazon customers, by the way, would like to see the workers unionize. And when you look at this number, Americans between the ages of 18 to 34, it tells you something really important about where the American mindset is right now. 83% of Americans between the ages of 18 to 34 support the unionization effort, okay? 80% of Americans between the ages of 35 to 49.

And even 71% of Trump voters between the ages of 18 to 34. I want to absorb that a little more because it's really, really important to understand why we're seeing the right wing use a lot of this populist rhetoric. And it's important to understand that it's all BS. So they realize that even their voters, their viewers in the case of Tucker Carlson, are paying close attention to this effort to, you know, create a better work environment for workers. You know, I want to pause in being too optimistic.

I want to be realistic about what's happening in the country. Yes, we're seeing more militant efforts by labor to take control of their workplaces, certainly relative to what we had experienced in previous decades. Okay, but fact of the matter is unions represent such a tiny, tiny amount of the workforce here in the United States. So we want to be real about that. However, there's a lot more attention being paid to these efforts now than we've seen in the past several decades.

And you think that Republican lawmakers haven't noticed that? You think Republican lawmakers don't understand how insanely frustrated Americans are about how rigged this economic system is against them, by the way? No, they know. They see the anger. They see the rage. But at the end of the day, while they might pay lip service to these frustrations, are they ever willing to do anything about it? You think they're interested in regulating corporations so they're not abusing their workers? Of course they're not. You think they're in favor of workers unionizing? You think they're in favor of a policy like the pro act that would provide worker protection. So as they're attempting to unionize, they're not retaliated against from their employers. They're not in favor of those kinds of bills. In fact, any time you hear populist rhetoric coming from the likes of Tucker Carlson, he immediately pivots to, we got to close our borders, hate black people, oh, Democrats or groomers, whatever nonsense that he pivots to. It's usually some culture war narrative that he wants to engage in.

But it's never really about empowering workers. At the end of the day, what labor militancy is about is power. Power in your workplace, power over your own life. power over what you get paid and the wages that you make. And I haven't seen any Republican genuinely fight on behalf of workers who want those things. Now to be clear, there are a lot of corporate Democrats running around who like to talk to talk when they're campaigning. But they also just like to pay lip service without carrying out the fight necessary to enact the laws that workers need for that added protection if they're looking to unionize or organize their. workplace. But I want everyone to be careful about the rhetoric that they hear from these politicians.

I want you to be careful about the populist nonsense coming from the right wing. Because at the end of the day, you know, for anyone who's arguing, oh, we got to work with them to build a broad coalition, that might be true with Republican voters, but that's very different from someone like Tucker Carlson who might have someone on to go after AOC, you know, under this like guise of union organizing. You think he supports union organizing? You think he wants workers to be treated better? No. He thinks the problem with corporate America is they're too woke. Not that they're abusive toward their workers or that they're maximizing their profits and essentially screwing over their workers in order to do so. He loves that system. He's been a proponent of that

system and will continue to be a proponent of that system. And we'll keep calling him out for that. But when it comes to the people who are really putting themselves at risk and doing so to better their own lives and the lives of their colleagues, it's the workers over at Amazon who, in the case of JFK8 successfully unionized, and hopefully in the case of this sorting facility in Staten Island, they'll be able to do the same. Now, by the way, going back to that more perfect union poll, the poll also found that the union's argument was significantly more popular. roughly 20 percentage points higher than the management side argument that workers don't need a union because they already have good pay and benefits. I mean, obviously, obviously. I mean, most Americans see what's going on. There is that disconnect between what we see in Congress, the discourse that's taking place among our lawmakers, and what ordinary Americans are experiencing in their day-to-day lives. Finally, a few other things I want to mention in regard to what Amazon is up to,

as they try to crush these efforts. Amazon has filed 25 objections with the National Labor Relations Board, seeking to overturn the Amazon labor union's watershed victory over at JFK8, arguing that the independent union intimidated workers into voting to unionize and challenging how the NLRB conducted the election. Yeah, sure. Uh-huh. they can't stand the fact that the workers succeeded.

And so now they're trying to crush that effort. Look, one of the areas where I think the Biden administration is certainly better than previous Democratic administrations is this NLRB seems to be far more effective and far more willing to fight on behalf of ordinary workers. They have stepped in to go after Amazon as it tried to crush organizing efforts. I love to see that. And again, that is rare. We didn't see that during the Obama administration.

So while we've been critical of Joe Biden and some of the weaknesses we've seen in his administration, I do want to give him credit for what we've been seeing with his NLRB. All right, we got to take a break when we come back. John Airolo will be joining me to talk about Bernie Sanders, possibly running in 2024. What do you think about that? that just think about it now let it marinate and when uh john comes in we'll have a discussion come right back thanks for listening to the full episode of the young turks support our work listen ad-free access members only bonus content and more by subscribing to apple podcasts at

apple dot co slash t yt i'm your host jank yugar and i'll see you soon Thank you.