The Young Turks - Brazenly Bigoted

Episode Date: July 29, 2022

 Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito spoke at Notre Dame in Rome and used that opportunity to mock people who disagree with the overturn of Roe V. Wade. Exxon Mobil Corp and Chevron Corp, the United States’s two major oil companies made $1 billion in their last quarter. Trader Joe's employees have made the first push to unionize with a vote. Fox News's Greg Gutfeld promises a ‘real insurrection’ if student loans are cut. Meta has just released a promo of Mark Zuckerberg and Neil DeGrasse Tyson hanging out virtually in space. Hosts: John Iadarola, Ramesh Srinivasan, Jessica Burbank *** 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 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. 3x3.3.5.3.3.3. 3.5. 3.3. 3.3. 3. 3. 3.3. I would not be overly put out if you chose to drop it. Welcome one at all to the Friday Power Panel with me, John Adiroula, forget that, that's not important. We've got two very special guests for you. First of all, contributor to Rebel HQ, Jessica Burbank.

Welcome back to the studio. Great to have you here. We're here. And then it's been so long, Ramesh, how's it going? What's up, man? It's great to be back with you. And nice to meet you, Jessica. Hey, nice to meet you. Oh, this is the first time you're doing a show together.

Yes, this is first. I'm very excited. You're both great people. I think it's going to be a great combination. We've got a lot of news that we're going to get to, and I'm very excited about that. We're going to jump into that. But as I alluded to in the intro, it has been a bit since at least I've done a panel with Ramesh. Ramesh, what have you been up to? How have you been spending the interim period between one pandemic leading into another? I mean, you know it's all was pretty wild, Ben. So I actually got, I was in southern Mexico exploring cooperatives and indigenous-led collective. that are building all sorts of crazy technologies in southern Mexico. So I was down in Oaxaca, Chiapas, and Puebla, and I got back last night,

and I was just telling Ashwaria that I lost my phone two weeks ago, and it's been super liberating for me. It's actually forced me to use my actual brain. And so I think I'm actually going to be working on a new book, which is all about what a people-centered and planet-centered digital world looks like, built upon tons of examples that I'm going to be gathering over the next several months from different parts of the global south. So I'm on my way to India and I'm on my way after that to Ethiopia and Southern Africa. That is amazing. I don't even like I only on some level

understand what you just said, but it sounds really cool. You basically are living the life of a character from a Kim Stanley Robinson novel basically, but I love it and I want to see more of it. In any event, what's that? You're all welcome to join me. Anyone, please. I would like to do that, actually. We'll talk. We'll DM. Anyway, we've got a lot that we're to be talking about. So thank you for joining us. Not only do we have an awesome hour planned, but in the second hour, which Anna Kasparian will actually be appearing on. They've got an awesome panel and she is going to be interviewing Congressman Roe Kana. So you know that's going to be exciting. You're not going to want to miss that. But with all that said, why don't we jump into our first topic?

After so recently helping strike down Roe v. Wade, Justice Alito is not satisfied. He wants to go on a bit of a victory tour and go around bragging about what he's done. And at the same time, insulting world leaders over it, which is a weird course to take. Take a look at this. I had the honor this term of writing, I think, the only Supreme Court decision in the history of that institution that has been lambasted by a whole string of foreign leaders who felt perfectly fine commenting on American law. One of these was former Prime Minister Boris Johnson, but he paid the price. Post hoc, ergo propteer hawk, right? But others are still in office. President Macron and Prime Minister Trudeau, I believe, are too.

But what really wounded me, was when the Duke of Sussex addressed the United Nations and seem to compare the decision whose name may not be spoken with the Russian attack on Ukraine. Get you a crowd as eager to awkwardly laugh as that one was for Samuel Alito. I don't know what the joke was, but they seem to like it. In any event, in a few minutes, we're going to be diving into the actual substance of what the recent destruction of Roe v. Wade is doing, what effect it's having on people around the country. But I want to pause on what he had to say there because it is an interesting thing to lay out that the concept that it's weird that

these world leaders would even opine about such a massive change in the status of rights that have existed for more than half a century. It's not, I don't generally think of the right as being very slow to criticize other countries' politics or talk about how we might be better than them in a variety of ways. And I personally found it at least somewhat heartening that that so many people around the globe, they felt it deeply, the loss of these rights, that they cared about it, even though America has all the different negative effects in countries around the world that we have, historically and up into the present, they still care about what happens here.

We have viewers all the time who have written in said that they're worried about us. I know people who've traveled abroad have had people make those comments to them. So it's such a weird thing to say that it's weird that Macron or Trudeau or whoever would have an opinion on such a massive reversal of long established precedent. Jessica, I want to start with you. What do you think about this? Yeah, this is embarrassing. Samuel Alito doing this is just embarrassing.

He is the person who wrote the majority opinion where he cited some research that the domestic supply of infants was down. Okay, many people have taken just that one citation and thought, what does this mean for our future? And many world leaders were watching what was going on in the United States since the leaked opinion and then when the Dobbs v. Jackson ruling came out. And the reason so many global leaders are concerned is because the United States is teetering towards human rights violations to force your citizens to give birth. Forced pregnancy is a war crime. It is a violation of human rights law.

And the United States is getting very close to committing human rights violations. And for him to say Boris Johnson, even Boris Johnson sees how awful this is, that's what I would take away from that. And for him to say that Boris Johnson, you know, being removed from office essentially is because of this is ridiculous. And he acknowledges his own logical fallacy, right? He says, you know, post hoc, ergo proctor hawk, which means, or proctor hawk, which means, you know, after this, therefore, because of this, because this happened, that means this causes it. And he gets a laugh from the room. He knows what he's saying is wrong and he's doing it anyway. And that seems to be a pretty common theme nowadays.

Yeah. Ramesh. Well, there's a market change here. Alito was appointed under Bush. And most of the Republican appointed Supreme Court justices until recently have not been so explicitly interventionist in their public language. So what we see something that's really happened is that the Supreme Court has become a politicized instrument of the right wing, right? And that's something that has been true in terms of some of their decisions in the past, but not in their sort of bold outspoken types of comments.

So the fact that Alito, whose draft report was leaked, and so that's something we have to explore here, how did that occur, right? To actually build support for that opinion, which Roberts himself was trying to mitigate, the fact that that's occurred meant means that we have arrived at a time where the Supreme Court is explicitly political, explicitly interventionist, and is not precedent based, right? Most courts, at least in the history of the United States, tend to elevate the value of historical precedent in their interpretation around overturning various laws. And that's not the case, and that's why we all as people and those of us who are progressives need to organize also seeing the Supreme Court as a potential antagonist.

And then the other point I just want to make very briefly is remember who is paying the price for these decisions. It's women, it's largely women of color, it's working class women, and it's women in rural and poor states and red states. Yeah, as well as members of the trans community. Exactly. Look, and you talked about the sort of generational shift where now they're a little bit more explicit about it. And we know that even inside of it when he was being nominated during his hearing, he didn't say, oh yeah, no, I'm totally going to get rid of it. I think it's garbage or I don't care or my God told me or whatever. I don't care. If you put me on the court, I'm going to get rid of it. That was the truth. That's the truth now. That was the truth then, but he couldn't

say it then. They all lied. They all knowingly lied, hiding the fact that they are, they're partisan hacks. That's why they're on the court. That's why they were moved up through the system, people like Amy Coney Barrett. This was the strategy. It was a conscious strategy that the right pursued for literally decades. And at the tail end of that strategy, We're supposed to pretend that, oh, they're just, they're just neutral, divinely inspired judicial instruments. They're not people. They don't have flaws or opinions or, you know, a worldview that's shaped by where they were born and that sort of thing. They're just interpreted, it's all garbage.

It's all BS. And way too many people and not just people on the right, I think, believe that that's what it is. I do want to ask you though because you mentioned the leak. I want to touch base with both of you and just see what you think because that was a big focus of the right when the leak happened was we have to discover what this is. Don't pay any attention to what it'll mean if Roe v. Wade is actually overturned. Let's focus on the leak. It's the most important thing ever.

And now they don't seem to care. I don't hear any of them talking about it. And they gave up quite a while ago. And I know that there's some theorizing that the leak might not have been done, as was initially theorized, to scare them into not overturning. Clearly that didn't work, we have that hindsight now. But actually to potentially impact other conservatives and lock them in. What do you, what do you think about those theories about the leak and whether we'll ever find out who it was?

Right, I think it's hilarious that, sorry, go ahead, Ramesh. Oh, it's okay. Well, I'll just say, I'll just say briefly that what we see occur here and John, both you and Jessica pointed this out is Supreme Court justice is acting like Republican right wing American politicians. And I think that's a market change, not just in terms of kind of temperament, but actually thumbing their nose at the international community. Right? So we saw that, of course, with the illegally rock war, right? That was an illegal war, a human rights violation, as Jessica pointed out. And we saw, you know, our political leaders thumbing their noses at the rest of the world around that. Now our justices are doing that. Now in terms of the leak, this to me comes straight out of the Trump playbook where there were tons of leaks all the time, right? And I'm not sure how many of them were directly connected to Trump or not. But basically what happens when these things circulate and we were all part of that is we all get polarized. And we all get freaked out those of us on the left or who are progressives or even just conscious people are traumatized with anxiety and it's very difficult for us to know what to do. And those of us who are on the right really kind of it's like revving it up, you know, hit the drums, drum beats of war. And so I feel like this is very typical of the way politics in the United States has shifted over the last decade, especially since 2016.

Jessica? Yeah, my mind immediately replays the news that week, Fox News, what right-wing pundits were saying, and they were all saying, what does this leak mean for the sanctity of the court, right? Not concerned about overturning president, but concerned about the sanctity of the court. How could you possibly leak something like this? But I think I would agree that it was most likely someone on the right, because this meant that not only were they going to foment a bunch of support from the people. people who have been involved in overturning Roe v. Wade for so many years, all of these

anti-abortion activists, but also to keep the justices in their original opinion, because if this leaks and someone changes their opinion from when Alito wrote to when Dobs v. Jackson was actually ruled on, now they become a target. And I think they're actually afraid of the right wing as well. And so I think it's more likely that it was the right. Obviously, the right is responsible for destroying this entity of the Supreme Court and making it a politicized entity. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, and look, I want to know the truth of all things, so I would like to know. But we do have to acknowledge if we found, let's say that we found out that Alito did it himself. He filmed a vlog or whatever where he said, I'm gonna totally do this and it's gonna help.

People wouldn't get the rights back. It wouldn't affect anything. Like if you if you live in one of these states, you'd still be screwed. So I would like to know I'd like to know, maybe it would hurt them politically a little bit, but there's no shaming the Supreme Court into changing course, especially once they've already decided on something, and I doubt even going forward. They're not worried about that at all. But really fast, I do want to touch face again with the substance of what this change accomplished. If we go to this first graphic, you're gonna see some of the breakdowns depending on where you live about where the status of your rights as of today. But bear in mind, it is just today when we're filming this. of filming this, I can't attest to which of your rights the Republicans might strip away in the next day or two. You never know, it's exciting waking up in America. But as of right now

already, some 40 million women, and I will add, and others as well, of childbearing age, live in states where abortion has become more difficult to access. About 630,000 abortions were performed in the U.S. in 2019 alone. The decision so far, of course, to overturn it has not been popular, about two thirds disprove of it, but the fact that what they want is wildly unpopular has never stopped the Republicans before, so they're staying the course. Now there are those aside from just us on the panel who've criticized Samuel Alito. AOC tweeted, remember it was Alito's opinion that leaked. That fact paired with his politicized remarks below should be alarming to anyone.

The Supreme Court is in a legitimacy crisis. Chief Justice Roberts has a responsibility to share the progress and results of Scotus Otis's leak investigation. And we talked about possible Supreme Court reform a little bit on TDR this point. And I do want to open it up to both of you to talk about that as well, because I think AOC is totally right to focus on the legitimacy crisis. But the crisis has very little to do, as we've already alluded to, with the leak. It doesn't even to me have that much to do with precedent being overturned.

That's worrying. It's more that like the entire process has. been it was never good. It wasn't good back in the 90s, but it makes no sense now that so much of our thought about the most important judicial body in the country focuses on should this person retire? Should they maybe try to wait six more months because people's rights might depend on who wins the next election? What if this person dies? What could that mean for all sorts of different? It makes no sense. The Supreme Court is so overdue for massive reform and And not reform that necessarily has to benefit leftists or Democrats or whatever, but you can come up with a far better way to do this so that you don't have, you know, an ever widening gap at the end of a term of a presidency where now they just won't allow you to confirm someone, let alone all of the other problems.

So I'm curious what both of you think about the prospects for and how you would shape reform if it were up to you. Yeah, I think we have two options that people are talking about a lot right now. One is to stack the court, right? That's the obvious one where we just add additional justices. There's nothing in the Constitution that says it has to be nine justices. There have been more than nine in the past. That's one option, of course. And that's an option for a reason, right?

They created our system of government with checks and balances, where if the judicial branch oversteps, the executive or the legislative branch can step in and correct that overstep, I think we're in a situation where this is a pretty clear overstep. The other option would be to impeach Supreme Court justices. They're impeachable so long as they're exhibiting bad behavior, anything that's not considered good behavior. So breaking the law, lying under oath. I don't know, someone's wife was involved with an insurrection, all of these things. That's bad. That's really bad. All of these are good reasons to impeach a Supreme Court justice, I would say. But then also, like, just consider should six

people even be able to determine the rights for everyone in a democratic system? Should we even have a system where that is something that can happen? Is the Supreme Court something that is necessary? I think that's up for debate right now as well. Yeah. Right. And in my mind, in my mind, much of the recent sort of, you know, over the, a lot of the states back, you know, there's a longer history to this, of course. We have multiple members who are now confirmed on the Supreme Court who have either committed sexual assault and or have lied under oath, right? We see we see pretty solid evidence when it comes to multiple members of the current Supreme Court and you got to fight fire with fire because

a lot of this fire started, you know, in its most recent phase with what happened when Merrick Garland was nominated by Obama and McConnell, you know, straight up gangster that out of, out of possibility. And so that's why, you know, remember two presidents who are not elected with the popular vote have dominated the number of justices that are on the Supreme Court. So we have to think every, every tool in the toolkit needs to be put out. Term limits, impeachment possibilities, packing the court with more justices, every ball. But really, this kind of gets to what every single time I'm on the Young Turks, I always think about, and I feel it in my own life, which is they are, they being the extreme right have taken over the Republican Party and are extremely aggressive.

And the question is, is what is it going to take to counter that? You have to counter that type of fire with fire. And that's not true in every case when it comes to legislative possibilities. For example, I know a different story. This mansion Schumer agreement, you know, I mean, it wasn't what I wanted, but it's way better than nothing. Let's hope it happens, right? I'm not saying for everything we need to be, you know, in everyone's face and, you know, punching people in the face. But I think when it comes to dealing with the extreme right on this issue, I think we've got to be really, really aggressive. And the question is, what is this, what is it going to take to convince Biden and the centrist Democrats to really recognize this is an existential threat for people and human rights in this country that this Supreme Court represents? Yeah, and it's so weird that they will be the last ones to ever acknowledge it.

The ones who theoretically have the most ethical obligation to be on guard for this sort of thing, who ostensibly due to their career should be the ones who are focusing most on it. Regular people get this. Regular people who are busy just trying to survive, working their jobs, they understand all of this. But Nancy Pelosi wants a strong Republican Party, and Joe Biden is friends with Lindsey Graham or whatever. They're going to be the last to understand it. In terms of their position on this, how radical they are in these particular areas, We're in such a weird position right now because they hold beliefs in this area, you know,

getting rid of Roe v. Wade, but on a lot of other areas as well, related to it, that are obviously out of stuff with the American people. They know that, they don't care. They've tried for half a century to sway people to their way of thinking, and they failed. And when that didn't work, they just decided to get the people of the Supreme Court instead. And they, we know how excited they are that they succeeded with Roe v. Wade. We know that they're gonna want more. The actual, the 30% of the country that this is all that they think about when it comes to politics. They want more. They want to take out IVF, they want same-sex marriage to be made illegal. They're not interested in throwing it to the states. That's a stopgap measure and nothing more.

They want it to be illegal on every inch of American soil. But at the same time, the elected Republicans know how wildly unpopular those positions. position. Colgate Total is more than just your favorite toothpaste. It's dedicated to advancing oral health. The new Colgate Total Active Prevention System features a reformulated toothpaste, innovative toothbrush, and a refreshing antibacterial mouthwash, all designed to work together to fight the root cause of common oral health issues, such as gingivitis, plaque, and tartar. Use the full routine twice daily and be dentist ready. Shop the Colgate Total Active Prevention System now at walmart.ca.

are. They're worried about getting wiped out. Maybe not so much in these midterms, although that's swinging back towards the Democrats a bit, but certainly in 2024. And so they and the pundits all have to pretend that any talk of next steps is crazy talk. You're going to crazy town, you're playing games, we would never want to do anything like that. But they're saying that, knowing that their base desperately wants to go farther, that what, 10, 15% of the country wants outlaw interracial marriage, let alone same sex marriage. And so it's so weird to try to counter this movement when they know that they have to lie about all of their positions. And yet they do still have to appeal to those people to win primaries to get them to support them. Any final thoughts about

that? Just as it turns out. Go ahead, Jessica, please. I would say being less bad than fascists isn't an inspiring political strategy that's not going to bolster people to support. support the party to support movements for change, that's not fighting fire with fire, fighting fascism with please give me $15 and continue to vote for Democrats, just really isn't it? I'm sorry, especially, especially when you endorsed an anti-abortion candidate, Henry Quayar in Texas. Come on. We need a party that's going to propose actual change, that's going to actually talk about constitutional amendments, actually talk about the reforms necessary to keep our democracy intact. We don't have that in the United States right now.

We just don't have a strong opposition party to the rise of fascism. I think that you made a really important point there, John, or at least you were alluding to it from how I interpreted, which is really that the Republicans who are elected to Congress or are part of Congress can actually hide behind the Supreme Court. And the Supreme Court in a sense of some sort of like shadow army or a front, it's just the court. It's just interpretation, it's just law, it's precedent. It's, you know, and so in a sense that actually is very, very effective for the Republican Party in when when candidates or elected representatives can make decisions how explicit they want to be on issues that are wildly unpopular with the American public and just defer to the Supreme Court. So that actually allows them to have their cake and eat it too. And you're totally right, Jessica. I mean, we have, we the people have to fight back here.

And, you know, having been in Mexico, which is a Catholic country and a conservative country, though very left in a lot of other ways as well, people were just repeatedly, every single day I was there for the last month, every single day people were saying, what's going on with your country? Because people around the world, for better or worse, do look to our country to see what's going on. And it has a massive spillover effect I've seen with people I've met from all around the world ever since this draft decision was leaked and the decision was made. Well, with that, we're going to take our first break. We come back, though, we got to touch base with some of the oil companies.

Turns out that while all of us have been suffering economically, they're having pretty good times over there. We'll have that and more after this. Welcome back to the power panel, everyone with me, Jessica and Ramesh. With that, why don't we jump in our next topic? Here's the thing. Chevron had its best quarter in nearly a decade, the first quarter of this year. Shell, guess what they just had, their best quarter ever. This is why you're paying $5 a gallon at the pump. Company CEOs see an opportunity to charge more.

They say it's market forces, but a barrel of oil costs about the same as it did in 2008, when gas was way cheaper. Today, you're paying way more so oil companies can profit way more. It's that simple. That's an ad from a group called Climate Power. It's part of a $3 million ad push to get people to understand the profit gouging that's going on. I want to be clear, though, that's an ad that was released before this week's news. familiar with the profits of these different oil companies, they were responding to the out-of-control

profits that were made in the first quarter by these companies. And what do you know, they did better in the second quarter. Exxon reported income of $17.9 billion for Q2. More than three times would it earn the same quarter a year ago. Chevron tripled their profits to 11.6 billion. And coming after oil prices nearly doubled from a year ago, it was expected that they would make more money. But Exxon and Chevron still beat analyst predictions for profits in the quarter. They're not the only ones, though. If you take a look at Shell, which has been a profitable corporation for a very long time, they've just all keep finding new ways to make more and more money.

You've got to not love it. And the results of an overall analysis of oil company profits imply that when you include Britain's BP and Shell and France's Total Energy, they generated $60 billion in earnings for the second quarter. And because I am such a mathematician, I'm like a human computer, that's like $2.8 billion a day. That is, remember like 10 years ago when we talk about how they were the most profitable corporations in the history of corporations? Yeah, they're doing way, way, way, way better than that. And I think it's important for people to understand that these profits were not earned in the traditional sense.

Every single dollar over and above the profits that they made a year ago, a little on five years ago, was stolen. They saw an opportunity and they took it out of your wallet, out of your pocketbook. It was yours, now it's theirs, and they're very happy about it. Absolutely, a thousand percent. Oil companies right now are treating the energy market like it's a casino and they are gambling, but they are also dealing for themselves.

When we saw global supply constrained, there was an opportunity for oil companies in the United States to increase production. And we had CEOs directly saying on on television in public that the reason they're not increasing domestic supply, the reason they're not drilling new wells and building new rigs is because they've promised their shareholders steady growth. Why? Because their shareholders don't want them to make additional investments and take on that additional cost to increase production. Because that cuts into profits and that reduces the returns to those shareholders. And the stock buybacks that we're seeing right now should be illegal. What they're doing is this is a company buying their own stock. The reason

they are doing this is because they want to boost their earnings per share. That's all they want to do. That's the net income of the company over the total available shares on the market. And when they reduce the total available shares on the market, they're increasing the return per share. And this makes the stock more valuable. This directly benefits the shareholders and the executives. Now they have much more money. This should not be legal. What should they be doing with that money instead of buying back their own stock to inflate the price of it? I don't know, is there anything wrong with the energy industry right now? Anything worth changing? Yeah, they're destroying our planet. They should be investing in research and development, new green technologies, building new green

infrastructure. And the reason they're not is not because this is just a few bad guys who are who are in the oil industry. This is because this is how our economic system is designed. They're allowed to do this. They're playing by the rules of the game because people just like them invented the rules of the game. And if we're interested in changing this, we've got to change the system itself. We've got to make it so that people actually have a say about how our resources and labor are used. Because right now it's a few guys who own a lot of capital making those decisions for us.

And we're gonna lose our planet as a result. Yeah, very much. With you more, valuation and stock market valuation is no longer necessarily correlated to GDP, nor is it always necessarily correlated to profitability. That's very interesting, right? Basically what stock valuations are like, especially if there's sort of essentially insider trading, which is what this is, as you pointed out. It's an arbitrary instrument of just maintaining capital and allowing capital to sort of accrue

its own value based on the buyback approach. I mean, note, you know, there's a bill that is bipartisan that's right now in Congress about people on Congress not being able to engage in these sort of insider training kind of approaches as well. So we are at a point here when it comes to capitalism where I'm not even sure we really could call this capitalism. I mean, this is something that Janis Varifakis described to me the Greek minister, former Greek minister of finance and, you know, had a progressive international with Bernie. He described to me as zombie-fied capitalism or vulture capitalism, right? We saw this during the pandemic. The stock market evaluation was in an all-time high. Well, we all know, the economy was suffering in a way that, in certain senses,

it may never have had in that particular way before. So that's, I think, point one I want to make. The one other really quick point I want to make is look at these inflation issues. Where does inflation come from? Inflation is not caused by us, the consumers or us as citizens. It's just whatever prices these companies choose to charge based on whatever they want, right? So when we see the interest rates going up, as was announced just a day or two ago, and that's happened to multiple times, what does that mean?

That means those of us who are in debt or have loans, basically middle and working class people, we are the ones who have to pay while these companies get to charge whatever they want. And this was not the case actually in the past. Even Nixon had actually capped price kind of price inflation dating back many decades ago. So I really recommend looking at some of the analysis of Richard Wolfe, the economist on these issues. But basically we're at a zombie stage when it comes to capitalism. This is not a free market. This is not even oligopolite capitalism. This is zombie instrument capitalism.

Yeah, I don't know 100%. Incredibly frustrating. I'm gonna show you some more numbers and I want to get into the buyback. back that Jessica was talking about. Overall, look at these percentage increases in profits from the previous year. I guess they're just, they're just doing much better work. They're innovative and they're dynamic and so you make two to ten times as much money. That's probably what it is. Oh, here's a convenience fun thing in terms of rigging the system. Jordan Yule, whose birthday is tomorrow, by the way, happy pre-birthday Jordan, pointed out that Chevron's effective

tax rate last year was 1.8% and Exxon's was 2.8%. I haven't looked at my taxes recently. I'm assuming it's comparable. That's probably what I would. That's probably what you're paying, right? Anyway, and then finally when it comes to buybacks, these are cobbled together from different sources, but Chevron supposedly is intending to do $15 billion in one year, $6 billion in Q3 for Shell, $2 billion in Q3 for total energies. Isn't that nice for them? And look, here's the thing. They make a product that, let's keep it real, doesn't just do damage to people, but it kills people, as Jessica was alluding to. And honestly, the profit gouging kills them in at least two financial ways at the same time. If you have to drive, you're paying more for your own gas, and you know how like every product costs more now than it used to?

Do you think the fact that shipping it's significantly more expensive because the gas is more expensive might be contributing to that too? But no, let's ignore it. Let's pretend that that has no influence on inflation either. But they're making something that is killing people. It is negative financially. It's negative in terms of public health, leads to respiratory illness. Something like 6 million people die every year just from the pollution alone. We have gotten rid of products in the past that were killing people. People love to point to lawn darts. Like one person got hit by a lawn dart and they were gone. What about CFCs? You know, this will be a history lesson for Charlie Kirk, who doesn't understand.

or Matt Wall, she doesn't understand any of this, we just got rid of it, despite the fact that corporations were selling it. They were making money, putting those into refrigerators and stuff like that. But we said, no, you can't do that. We did that with Four Loco, was getting people drunk and hyped up at the same time. So it was taken off the market. You can do that. Now you might say, well, your car doesn't run on Four Locke, which is why I'm willing to be merciful. We're not going to immediately get rid of it. You can maintain, Shell, you can exist, Chevron, you can exist, but some amount of your profits, let's say 90% are going to go towards transitioning off of oil.

You can continue to make money for a little bit, and the rest of it will go, including whatever price gouging you decide to do, we'll go directly into solar and wind and all sorts of things. We can do experiments in geothermal if you want, we can get wild with it. But that is, I think, a perfectly reasonable way to go around this. But instead, we're just, we're looking for new ways to drill more. We're looking to drag this thing out for a few more decades, decades that we can ill afford to waste.

Yeah, it's a consumer safety issue as well. And sometimes we have had some history and some success. I mean, this now dates back some decades in the United States of kind of framing legal regulatory action as consumer rights based or consumer safety based. Here I'm thinking about things like seat belts or the Clean Air Act. Some of the regulations that occurred with big tobacco, for example, historically. But of course we have a corrupted system, right, where fossil fuel industry has so much power just like, you know, the assault weapon industry, right? I mean, I know that that's talk about something that kills people, right?

And so some of those regulatory actions have not managed to occur. And we see the perversion of our democratic system because our political leaders are so influenced by those particular industries. So again, you know, something's going to have to give at some point, right? And I know we're going to talk about unionization and worker power movements. And maybe that's part of it. But I think we're more and more closely arriving to something that looks more futile in terms of the economic system that we have today. It's techno feudal, though. A lot of it is about data and technology as well. Okay, that sounds marginally cooler.

Jessica. Sounds like a music genre. Yeah, I think we're going to start to see people talk about price stability legislation and price stability policy and And people are going to say crazy things about how price controls are terrible. And you can't intervene in the economy in that kind of way. And things are crazy because of inflation. But it's very important to understand that all inflation is, is a measure of price changes over time. And if there are certain corporations that are increasing prices because they choose to, because they are price gouging, they are selling a necessary good or service, and they're

charging more than is deemed reasonable, that's what price gouging is. If they're doing that, that needs to be stopped. And that is the source of the majority of our inflation, especially when we look at what these oil companies are doing, oil and gas companies, which as John just pointed out, really affects the price of everything else. Because of our supply chain, because of the extensive transportation that needs to happen to get goods from where they're created to where they're sold, that adds a lot to the final cost of a good or service when you're purchasing it in the store or online, which happens law right now as well. But that's not the main point. The main point is that price stability is going to be a huge debate. People are going to spread so much misinformation about it, but it is the only way to curb this inflation. Even Jerome Powell right now is admitting that raising rates isn't going to do much about inflation.

And it's a huge problem that they are charging more. And as remains pointed out, you know, the rate of return on capital is now much faster than the rate of growth in our economy. And it's precisely because we are charging so much more for something that has the same utility of when we are charging less for it. You're not getting more. They're not producing it more efficiently or producing it in a better way. You're not getting a better product. It has the same utility. And so it should have the same value. And the only way to curb this is price stability. And I think hopefully soon we'll see some progressive start to talk about it. Yeah. Yeah, I could see that being a thing that Buttigieg runs on on 24. Absolutely. It would be bold. Anyway, we're going to take

our second break of the hour. When we come back, hey, more successful unionization. We're going to give a little tip of the hat to them. And then we're going to be talking about student loan debt cancellation, which we're still waiting for that two week period to pass where Biden was going to announce his plan. Maybe it'll happen live on air. We'll be right back. Okay, everybody, we've got just a little bit more time. Why don't we jump into one of the stories that remains? Following up successful unionization efforts at places like Starbucks and Amazon and others, hey, Trader Joe's, welcome to the team.

You've got workers at store in Hadley, Massachusetts. They voted 43 to 31 to unionize, becoming the first store in that company to do so, according to the NLRB. There is another store that's in the process, I believe, right now. And so this might start to spread as it has for others. We have some reactions from those who are taking part in this effort, which, by the way, is going through Trader Joe's United, an independent union that formed not too long ago. A message from Skyler, who's been there for three and a half years saying, I'm Skyler,

and I'm voting yes for the union at Trader Joe's and Hadley. My amazing coworkers are the reason Trader Joe's is a great place to shop and we deserve. a seat at the table in determining our compensation and working conditions. Tony Falco, who's worked there for 16 years, says, when workers stand together, we have the power. That's why I support Trader Joe's United. And Sarah's been there for 18 years, says I'm voting yes, because as a captain and now crew member, I watch the company put profit over the well-being of the crew repeatedly. It's time for us to have a say in the decisions that affect our lives.

That means a union, and that means a contract. And there's a lot of information floating around about some of the issues that people at the Hadley store as well as others have with Trader Joe's. They have a robust retirement plan for many years, 15% of the earnings being contributed. But starting about a decade ago, the company lowered its contribution to 10%. Last year, it lowered it again to 5% for many employees. It has since announced that it would no longer specify a set contributions. So, you know, there it's not just that the benefits never existed and a contract might afford you them. They did exist. People had it for many years and it's slowly been whittled away.

They had health care benefits that have been reduced for part-time workers. They used to offer benefits to part-time workers, but raised the weekly required hours to qualify from 20 to 30 hours a week after Obamacare was passed. They had some additional measures that came about at the beginning of the pandemic, safety and health-related measures. as well as additional pay, and all of those were dialed back as well. Many of the employees at these stores saying they were dialed back way too early in the pandemic. So there's a lot that led into this store, let alone others deciding to unionize. But, you know, as a person who shops at Trader Joe's, I like the idea that one of the local ones might be union soon. What do you both think about it?

Yeah, it's great news. I'm really one of the one of the sort of themes that I've been most just like my heart has been warmed by over the last two years has been the emergence of these unionization drives and movements I think it's really notable and and kind of we need to understand where this comes from right this comes from a couple really really troubling statistics that are occurring in this country the youngest generation in this country or I guess one might say Gen Z is the first generation in the history of this country to make less than its parents generation if you account for inflation and other kinds of kind of control for various other economic variables. That's very indicative. And life expectancy is decreasing in this country. So, you know, we've seen across the board, you know, Amazon workers, Starbucks workers, we saw the movement for a $15 minimum wage at Disney, McDonald's and so on. These are really, really important movements that are occurring. But there are major threats that they face. Consider, for example, how Starbucks said that their workers could, they would fund them to travel to get abortions,

but not for those who are unionized. Consider how many of these companies, especially Amazon, but I wouldn't put it past some of the retail giants are experimenting with both gig work, which is extremely insecure and extremely precarious, as well as with automated technologies, especially Amazon, right? People wearing fitbits, drivers being monitored. by all sorts of biometric and other surveillance systems. This is also to train robotic systems to replace workers. Yeah. So work and workers are precarious, and this is all part of the larger story

of the incredible displacement of wealth and power and the incredible sort of fragmentation of an economic polity that is at all, you know, sort of rational or reasonable in any democratic nation. Democratic nation. And so these are the things that are occurring. And just the last quick thing I'll say is, you know, John, I worked on Bernie Sanders 2020 campaign, and I was like so honored to be part of that. And one of the things I think that's just been super cool about Bernie is how he has been showing up at a bunch of these protests and a bunch of these unionization drives. And it's a good reminder that political change doesn't just come obviously from progressives in Congress or maybe some liberals,

But it also can come from people standing up for their rights. Yeah. Yeah, we've got two former Bernie 2020 folks on the panel tonight. That's exciting. And then one loser. Yeah, it was also. I didn't do nothing. Okay, I have four points on the Trader Joe's union. First, and maybe most importantly, hot labor summer, very important.

Secondly, I love Trader Joe's. And I would feel better about shopping there if the workers had a union, pretty simple. And three, the commodification of everything for profit will not be successful unless workers are paid living wages, fair wages. They will have no money to spend to buy your products if you don't pay them well. And it's a weird chicken or the egg situation where they keep raising prices, but they don't want to pay higher wages. And eventually they're going to piss enough people off that people are just going to refuse to participate in the economy because it's not worth their time and they're going to learn to grow their own food or something.

The last point on this. Hot agriculture summer, coming to you, 2027. Plants and vegetables, plants and fruits. Okay, also, I know it's really easy to publicly support all of the front of the house workers, right? The cashiers at Trader Joe's that we love, the baristas at Starbucks, but it's very important to remember that Trader Joe's packages a lot of their own products. They make a lot of their own products. There are people in warehouse working for Trader Joe's that I'm sure are not experiencing much better. labor conditions than the folks who work in the stores. And so I would like to see the warehouse workers get a union as well. Yeah. Absolutely. And we should remember, by the way, that while we do segments like this to spotlight successful efforts and to, you know, even the attempts, I wish you very mind, it's not easy and it's not automatic. These things are difficult. There could be a lot of pushback. Ramesh was alluding to one. They'll sometimes say, here is a set of benefits that will give, but only if you don't unionize. We've had stores even in

Southern California grocery stores that had been entirely shut down because they had started moving in that direction. Sometimes it's not as explicit. But even in this case, if we could jump ahead of Graphic 7, sorry, graphic 8, there were mandatory meetings where managers tried to dissuade them for voting for the union. Some were told explicitly to vote no. One worker said a manager sent him home in late May for wearing a union pin to work. But interestingly, Successful unionization can improve the quality of life, the benefits, and the pay. But it isn't even just for those people, for union workers, or those who work in union stores. There's ripple effects from these sorts of things.

We've seen that throughout the last year, and we see it here too. Less than a week before workers began voting in Hadley, Trader Joe's announced in an internal memo that it was increasing benefits nationwide, raising Sunday and holiday pay by $10 an hour, as well as the rate of accrual for paid time off. It did say it would give out raises to employees with more tenure at the company to increase pay equity across the company. So basically every worker in America was born and raised in a country that has done everything it can in terms of the news and popular culture to get them to hate the very idea of unionization, to hate the very idea of collective action, those sorts of things. But thankfully, it doesn't seem like it's stuck, at least for some of the youngest generations. And so there's another store in Minneapolis that's going to be having a vote next month.

Workers at a store in Colorado have actually filed an election petition just this week. So Trader Joe's is the next frontier apparently. You love to see it. And I wanted to mention one quick thing, John, which is I think we need to recognize how the working class in this country increasingly is not just described as sort of alienated white, you know, rural peoples, for example. It's it's it's it's we're often talking about women of color and we're actually talking about Gen Z and many of these people are affected by the what I call the part-timeization of work the gig work gig economy and digital labor and so it's really important that we advance progressive movements legislative possibilities that allow people who have fragmented types of work you know eight hours for task rabbit 10 hours for Uber you know this kind of hustle of trying to live amidst massive amounts of students in debt, mind you, and debt in general, that these kinds of folks who are precarious and fragmented within these systems that no longer offer any sort of economic security have an ability to have collective power. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah. Student loan debt that could be

canceled. It could be canceled right now or right now or Biden could do it now. That would be a good time, maybe later today, maybe he's eating, maybe he's biking, maybe he's falling off a bike. I don't know what he's doing, but he could do it after that. That would be great. Get up, Dust yourself off, cancel student loan debt. I'd love to see it. Anyway, we got time for one more story and it's a weird one. So buckle up and let's jump into this. I'm here with Neil deGrasse Tyson, renowned astrophysicist and host of the popular star talk. So what is this all told us about the universe that we didn't already know? It's opening a window to the universe that we didn't previously have access to.

No, it hasn't. No, no, I could have watched that image on my monitor, actually. No disrespect to Neil deGrasse Tyson, but that sucked. That's the metaverse, I guess. And you are going to participate in it, regardless of what you want, they're going to force it on you, okay? Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook and everyone else, it's going to be the NFTs of the next 20 years and you're going to learn to love it or at least participate and not love it at all. That's the next wave. They literally renamed the company. I still call it Facebook because they don't want me to and I don't care what they want. But they want you to think of it as beta because the metaverse is the next big thing. And maybe for some things it will be.

But the parts that are going to be good are going to have anything to do with Mark Zuckerberg. Assuming he's still rich, he'll buy the companies that make the good parts and probably ruin them. But anyway, that's the state of it right now, really low-res, like first Nintendo Wii quality graphics, low polygon models, and it's the future, I guess. I don't know, Ramesh, I want to start with you. Can this be salvaged? Yeah, thank you, John. Okay, so first of all, Metaverse has a history in virtual reality conversations and in cyberpunk literature. People who read William Gibson or Neil Stevenson. There was this discussion.

Yeah, there was a lot of like poetics about entering this kind of world where you were sort of kind of, it was this world of like, it was kind of sensory over stimulation, but it was all displaced from physical reality. So this is sort of like something that people in Silicon Valley are obsessed with. They're really into various sort of strange mythologies and taking things that we read as fiction and kind of getting so into it. Like this is how they talk about AI that they're like, oh my God, AI is going to be super conscious and we're all screwed. Never forgetting that they're building AI systems to screw everybody over right now in much more real world senses. So what the Metaverse is is a different, it's proprietary online virtual reality worlds that are built by and for corporations. Think the Truman Show here where you enter into this world and everything that's in that world is built upon surveilling you to capitalize upon your data and your attention. And it's an ecosystem for any other businesses or any other organizations to basically have to pay to play.

Right? So I've had random companies, businesses, nonprofits reach out to me and say, hey, how do I make myself, you know, worth anything in this metaverse? So people might look at these graphics and be like they're super dorky or whatever. But remember, as you said, John, these are early stage graphics. They're going to get more and more advanced. And we're not going to be wearing these dorky goggles. It's going to be built upon brain machine interfaces, which are increasingly emerging out of Silicon Valley. Think Black Mirror episodes here. So why is this actually a real world issue and why are these companies like the wealthiest companies in the world so obsessed with this? Because they already have captured so much of our data and so much of our attention and they have billions of people hooked on their products around the world. So Facebook, the company, whatever, call them meta if you want, are a company that have hundreds of millions, if not over 1.7 or so billion approximately WhatsApp users, multiple, you know, overborder. billion, a few billions, excuse me, Facebook users, Instagram users. These are all different companies that are owned by the parent company. So they've captured global markets and they've captured our data. And now the idea is reroute you to this virtual world where we can harvest your attention and

manipulate you because a big part of the business model is about behaviorism. It's about manipulating your behavior and your psychology and your emotions and your anxieties based on what you're presented based on data that's being constantly captured. and gathered about you. And so this is one of many things I'm trying to fight back against in my writing. Yeah, this is scary stuff, man. I think it's a distraction, right? We're paid less than a living wage.

There's multiple pandemics brewing, our planet's burning. And we're like, hey, like, can we have a better world? Can you like invest in some technology and innovation that makes things marginally better? And they're like, nope, the best we can do is just let you pretend for like a little while about that. It's not great, I really can't wait, can't wait to sell my labor in the metaverse to whoever claims land in the metaverse. And then when I met a protest, the meta government and get arrested by the meta police and go to meta jail, I don't think it's going to be a fun time. I don't think it's going to be a fun time. And I don't think giving us virtual reality is going to resolve our actual reality.

But I do think they're trying to distract so many people with all of these fantastical things like, look at outer space. Isn't the world amazing? And it's like, we're not going to ignore all of the other terrible things that you're doing just because you give us cool stuff to look at. Yeah, 100%. To that end, I saw this recently. We don't have a graphic for this, but there's a new report upon Gizmodo. Meta approved ads on Facebook in Kenya in both Swahili and English that included explicit calls

to rape and behead Kenyan citizens along ethnic lines. Despite stating that they were taking election security and stuff around elections and politics so much more seriously. Yeah, no, I think they've got a lockdown on this whole politics thing. Bear in mind, by the way, going forward, eventually, as Ramesh said, it's going to look better than that. But also, it's not going to be Mark Zuckerberg trying to get you in there. It's going to be the people who are selling, like trying to hot flat belly tea right now. I'm not saying these specific people, but it's going to be Taylor Swift trying to get you in or Kim Kardashian. People that you look up to trust and respect

will be telling you about how cool it is because Mark Zuckerberg gave them a digital palace or whatever, they will be trying to get you in. And that is going to be way more persuasive. When every celebrity and influencer is being paid huge amounts of money to get you in there so they can get your data, they can get you to buy products that you see in there, that's going to be a whole other issue. It's totally, you're totally on point with that. It's the influencer model and it's the peer model. And it plays to people's sense of alienation. and just a lack of meaning around what our lives are all about. But I want everybody to recognize that the titans of these tech companies also don't really know what they stand for either.

They're either obsessed with going off to space or they're obsessed with these sort of AI-like fetish kinds of themes. And I think it's because there's a general existential sense of meaninglessness and alienation that's really part of this time and where technology has gone. And you know, that's why I work on on issues all around the world, including in the United States, where technology takes on a completely different identity, one that supports our real lives, our real movements, and our real values as people on a beautiful planet. Yeah, I appreciate that. And I appreciate both of you for joining me for the Young Turks today. Rematchett is always a pleasure to speak with you, you know, and I hope that you get out there and you can help counter some of these trends we're seeing. Thank you for joining us.

Thank you, John. Thank you, Jessica. Yes, and Jessica, always glad to have you here, and especially in studio. Thank you for being here. We'll drop our favorite Trader Joe's products in a TikTok live soon. We're going to do that. Everyone, you can check out her work at Rebel HQ as well as on TikTok and Instagram and all of that. For those of you watching at home, there is a lot more to come, so don't go anywhere. And a conspiracy you'll be taking over after this. Thanks for listening to the full episode of the Young Turks. Support our work, listen to ad-free, access members-only bonus content, and more

by subscribing to Apple Podcasts at apple.com at apple.com slash t-y-t. I'm your host, Shank Huger, and I'll see you soon.