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Everything.
A bit of an interesting incident causing a lot of controversy here in Capitol Oil.
Let's go and put this up there on the screen.
So Congressman Van Orden, a former US Navy seal from Wisconsin, is being rebuked by the Senate Chamber because he yelled at some high school age pages.
So I guess let's first explain the situation. These Senate pages.
Were playing on the floor of the Capitol Rotunda on Wednesday night because the Senate had late votes. They apparently were laying on that floor and they had their phones and were taking pictures of the dome, which from the direct center, which actually is a very beautiful picture if you've ever seen it. I encourage anybody if you're ever on a tour, try and go to the Dead Center and actually look up, because it is pretty cool. It's
very beautiful artwork, some famous stuff going on there. But eventually what happened is that Van Orden apparently came in there and called these kids quote little shits. He's like, what do you think you're doing here? Yelled at them, like, got in their face, told them to leave. He said, I don't give a shit who you are. I'm a congressman. Get the fuck out of here. So vicious tirade against
the pages. And now it's chamber on chamber action. He's been censored officially by the Senate, so McConnell and Schumer calling him out for doing this. There's also some speculation as to whether Van Orden himself was drunk when any of this happened. Let's go and put this one up there on the screen. There's actually a photo there. So Van Orden claims the Capitol rotunda served as a field hospital where countless Union soldiers died fighting to Freeman in
the Civil War. I've long sent our nation's capital as a symbol of sacrificer service to my women have been treated for his country.
She never be treated like a fratthouse.
Common room, threatening a congressman with bad press to excuse poor behavior as a reminder of everything that's wrong with Washington.
Luckily, bad press has never bothered me.
And if it's the price I paid a stand up for what's right, then so be itgged God. Also, we can see the photo here. Let's put the photo up there please on the screen. This actually shows you Congressman Van Ordon's office, beer bottles and alcohol on the table.
Van Orden.
To be fair to him, he says that he does beer and cheese tours out of his office for constituents.
That's why the alcohol was there.
It's not indicative of him being drunk during the incident, So your thoughts crystal well.
They also say that his staff were heard partying loudly before he cursed it. The fifteen year old Senate pages who were doing absolutely nothing wrong taking pictures actually showing I mean really showing reverence to the Capitol building that they wanted to you know, capture, and remember what I mean.
This has come on. I always think that.
The way you treat people who are lower on the totem pole than you in terms of social hierarchies is the most revealing aspect of a human being we see in this business all the time. How do hosts treat their makeup artists, how do they treat the crew? What do they act like when the cameras are not on? And so to be screaming at these fifteen year old pages who were there, By the way, I don't know if people know, like what the page program is. When
can you get selected by your congressman? Most congress people run like some sort of a contest for civic minded youngsters to compete to be able to get this honor of coming here and spending I don't know if it's a semester a whole year.
Doing all the like grunt work running around the capital, yeah, and that sort of stuff all around.
And this has been going on for many, many decades, as program spending existence for a long time. And so to to treat these kids this way, I mean, come on, if you really have a problem with their behavior, you could explain to them why this is. You know, this is important, an important place, and here's the history, and here's why you should be, you know, laying on the
floor taking a photo. Athough again, I personally think there was absolutely nothing wrong with it, so much worse behavior on his part than on the part of.
Well, apparently that there's a tradition where they get to rest inside the Capitol whenever there's late night votes going on. So I think that he misunderstood the situation and he wasn't these a newer congressman.
So I think that's part of the reason why. H Yeah, I mean, I don't think.
You should be treating kids this way, and you certainly shouldn't be yelling at them, as you said, if you really thought they were doing wrong, he could have explained maybe they didn't know that people died on the floor or whatever.
Also, I still don't think that they were doing it.
They weren't anything particularly out of order. And so yeah, now this is like a mini scandal on Capitol Hill. Some people are trolling him a congressman. Actually, Chip Roy did the actual pose laying on the ground and taking the photo, really tagged him in it. Yeah, so he's his own colleague Cruise. Yeah, people are really making fun of this guy. So well, I mean, him and his staff are refusing to back down. They're like, listen, he did nothing wrong.
He did the right thing.
That's the other thing.
That irritates me about it is you know what if he put out a statement that was like, you know what, guys, I was tired, it was late, I popped off.
I shouldn't have done it. I'm sorry. Okay, that's one one thing, right, But.
He doubles down on this like he's standing up for the honor of the nation by cursing out a group of kids. Like luckily, bad press is never bothered me. If it's the price I pay to stand up for what's right, then so be it.
Like, come on, dude, take take the L. Take the L.
And apparently also he had previously cursed out some like library page, another kid I saw over some like book in the library that he didn't like or whatever, back in Wisconsin.
So this is this is a pattern for him.
And I'm sure he's all family values, et cetera, et cetera, if you were to ask him his political views.
Okay, all right, good for him.
We'll see you guys later. A really sad new economic development. That's just a sign of the times. Let's put this up there on the screen. Local malls, once the hallmark of a community, are now stuck in quote a death spiral and are plunging in value in terms of commercial
real estate. They point to Crystal that quote, lower end malls are now worth at least fifty percent and in some cases more than seventy percent less than they were when mall valuations peaked in late twenty and sixteen the overall. They point to several malls, for example, that have been sold at foreclosure auction. The best example was one which was appraised in twenty twelve for one hundred and fifty three million dollars sold at foreclosure for just nine point
five wow. Quote, more than fourteen billion dollars of loans are backed by properties come due just in the next twelve months. Mortgage rates are actually up, so refinancing that debt is going to be dramatically more challenging and expensive. At the very same time that overall department store closures are actually much higher this year than the previous two years,
and we're beginning to normalize over the baseline. I mean, really, what's interesting to me is looking at department store closures in malls. It peaked in twenty eighteen, twenty nineteen, and then anything that did survive appears to be dying now in twenty twenty three, so it was already basically on its last legs and now somebody's coming through and like shooting the rests.
But yeah, it's very sad.
I mean, like, for example, they point to Macy's, JC, Penny and Sears closed quote eight hundred and seventy five stores just between twenty nineteen and twenty twenty, and that quote COVID and more has quote accelerated the death spiral of the industry because the department stores were the anchors that a lot of the smaller businesses could be around. I don't know, I may I'm just personally nostalgic for this because it was like a huge thing to do in the pre Internet era, go to.
Go to the mall.
I mean it just like, isn't there like a little strang your Things season around the mall?
I mean it's just where there's a whole like mall cop series.
Yeah, the Paul Blart Mall cop I mean, many of these like connected culturally because it was genuinely a shared experience. It was a huge hub actually for local commerce, and it basically just looks dead after the Internet and especially after COVID.
So it's really sad.
Yeah, I mean, these things were already suffering in the online retail era, and then Covid hits and that was like a death noel for a lot of them. And I was a little bit helpful because I do like the mall. I still go to the mall. I still am very attached to my local mall, which is the mall that I went to as a child and as a teenager shout out to these Pennsylvania town Center and it felt like at my local mall, actually there's been pretty good foot traffic. Like when I go in there,
it's not dead. I will say. The department stores are very sad. You go in there and there's like no salespeople and the all the merchandise is super old and it's pretty sparse, Like the department store situation is kind of sad. But overall, my little anecdotal assessment being at my own mall was that like, oh, maybe post pandemic, it's actually made people appreciate being in person more. Maybe there's been like a little mini resurgence in the mall world.
No, not so much so.
You had initially right downtowns that got destroyed by the mall, by suburban shopping, and now you have the suburban shopping getting destroyed by online, and some malls that I've seen, even the big department stores are now basically like Amazon Warehouse.
Right, That's the thing is effectively, what has happened is that there's been incredible a months of concentrations. So instead of the dispersed eight hundred stores, there's now just super malls. Like the top ten percent locations are really the only
ones that survive. I'm relatively lucky, you know, both of us are because you live in very populated areas, like the populated area more so than like Texas where I'm from, right, Like I could drive an hour from where I'm from and actually not see anybody a little bit less now, but specifically whenever I was.
Growing, from where I am from where I live to the mall is forty five minutes, So all right, that's my local town.
I mean, we at least, you know, around d C, we have like super malls that certainly are doing well. But the problem in my opinion, is that now they're super crowded because they're like the only malls that everybody can go to.
So now there's like one mall for like a million people.
Effectively, yeah, and so it's actually your unpleasant experience I think whenever you visit it. But yeah, I mean it's just a cultural touchstone which I think is just dying. Is it's just effectively gone at this point, and the shared experience I think for teenagers and all that. If you live in a more suburban area. I don't know if it's going to be accessible to a lot of it.
I don't really know what people do now, but it's not this and it's just that's the interesting Yeah, you're right scrolling.
Yeah, I mean that is there's just a lot less that's like in person, because yeah, when I was a teenager, that was the thing to do, especially once I could drive, you know, go with your friends, just go walk around, get a pretzel at Antie ends that Yeah, still a big fan of that.
Actually, we had anti Ens pretzels.
That are well you can get them. You can get them now in the airport.
That's the only time I even seeing on there.
They don't.
They're still so good. So go to your local mall for no other reason than to buy.
The hot prouss.
I feel like this smell is particularly I don't know if it's fake or not kind of like subway is a fake bread smell, but man, it does hit every single time. All right, everybody enjoy We'll see you guys later.
Did a monologue last week about a class trader that I had my eye on, Abigail Disney. She is the granddaughter of Roy Disney, one of the co founders of Disney. She's been speaking out, become quite an activist, recently got arrested, and she's also a film producer. And she joins us, Now, great to have you, Abigail.
Good to see you, great to be here.
Yeah.
Absolutely, So this interview gave to Rolling Stone really caught my eyelists put this up on the screen. So one of the things you say here is you woke up one day and realized that just by virtue of being born lucky, I had so much more than everyone else. And I don't think I've slept well since I figured that out. I wonder if you could reflect on that moment of realization and also what you feel like you owe to society given your birth into wealth and privilege.
Yeah, yeah, so, you know, actually, there were many moments over the years, and the one moment about private planes was definitely one moment when I was flying alone on a seven thirty seven with you know, a waitress, I mean, a stewardess flight attendant and a queen's size bed to sleep in, and just you know, wrong, wrong, just wrong, and I couldn't keep operating that way. It just felt wrong in every conceivable way.
And I've I've had.
Moments like that along the way multiple times, and Yeah, what it brings up in you is the idea that you know that other people are suffering, a lot of people are suffering, and sometimes indirectly as a result of the reason you have. You have all that you have, so you really have to kind of in interrogate the things that put you in this city vantaged position you're in and go find out what you can do about some of this inequity.
That's what I'm trying to do, so, Abigail.
I mean one of the reasons too, that we've been taking a lot of notice of your comments, not just about that, but also you know, in terms of the writers strike, we have the CEO of the company who helm's one that bears your name, Bob Eiger, you know,
speaking out against the demands of these writers. So as somebody both from your position but also, you know, you have the Disney last name, Like, what did it feel like to watch kind of that happen with somebody with the scion of your family and something that you guys work so hard to build?
Yeah, I know.
And Ashley, this is something I've not quietly been saying about Bob Iger for quite some time now, because his pay has been outrageous for years, and there was a year in there when he made two thousand times what his night janitors were making. And that's just again the idea that you sleep well at night knowing that is disturbing to me. What he said about what he said about the demand being unrealistic and disruptive, those those were the parts that really caught people off guard because.
That was.
Laying there the reality that those demands that the writers and the actors are making are only unrealistic if you're tethered to this particular way of doing capitalism, and it's you have to be unrealistic about the lives of the writers in order to expect them to live the way that they've been living. So our unrealisms are colliding with each other, and there's going something's going to have to give.
And what's been giving up till now is almost constantly the workers the way we do capitalists, and this fundamentalist version of it that we practiced needs to change. And Bob Eider is just as much a practitioner of fundamentalist capitalism as as Jack Welch.
Wash.
Can you speak a little bit to the mindset, because I mean you, you know, you swim in these circles, and so you have perhaps a unique window into how someone does sleep perfectly fine at night, while you know some of their workers are homeless and unable to afford just the basics of life that are going on on strike because they can't afford rent, they can't afford to eat,
they certainly can't afford to have a family. How do people who are in that position make sense of that and still feel themselves to be moral actors.
Well, you know what a lot of those folks say is I'm just paying the going rate. That's just the rate. It's a free market and that's what you pay. And it's not a free market. First of all, Disney gets all kinds of incentives and perks from governments from local
to state to federals. So it's not a free market, and it's not a free market in terms of wages, because if McDonald's and the Gap and everybody else has sort of made a gentleman's agreement and I use the gender term intentionally here to keep wages where they are, then it's not a free market. So the idea that they're just paying the going rate is what helps them sleep at night.
And then what I've heard is, well, but the government's letting them down.
The government hasn't made sure that they can afford the things they need, which is kind of an extraordinary hypocritical cop out, given the way they fight the government at every turn when it comes time to pay their taxes, and they you know, and they strong arm all these subsidies out of the government, and yet the government is the first place they turn when they think their workers aren't getting enough to eat. So the taxpayers are picking up the bill for a lot of the shortfalls that
corporations are enforcing on their workers. And I feel like the rank and file in this country should be a lot angrier about the way we're doing right now, you know.
And I'm interested here. I'm most curious Abool in your view of Disney itself. Everything I've read about Roy Disney, about your father, about the belief in Disney animation, the connection to the family, about Disney World, the experience that the average family could get whenever they're connecting with the day Disney brand, and the experience Erica we've seen it monetized to an extraordinary degree. Is specifically also in recent
months in terms of prices and all that. Do you view that kind of as a parallel to the same societal problems of what we're seeing today.
So that's essentially why I made the film that I just made, which is called The American Dream and Other fairy Tales, and you can find it on I hate saying this Amazon.
And iTunes, sorry about that.
You know, I was so struck by how different it was from the way I remember it being when I would grow with my grandfather, roy O Disney and then my father roy E, And you know, I was so struck by, first of all, the way my grandfather's related to the employees there. You know, he really didn't see himself as better than anyone. He didn't really see himself as inhabiting a slice of society that was any you know,
higher or more important. And that's a really important mindset difference, because that mindset difference is another piece of the way you sleep well that night. When you're paying people submnimum wages, you know, you sleep well at night because well, they're not you, They're not like you.
You're a different person on this cloud.
So my grandfather never never acted that way, never treated people their way. And he understood the job of being a CEO as creating livelihoods, which is a very different thing from just paying salaries or creating jobs. And he really understood that people were raising their families on these wages. And so if you were a janitor at Disneyland in the beginning in the nineteen fifties and sixties, you could afford to buy a house, You could afford to send
your children to college. Yes, this is partly the government and you know, abandoning people as well, but it was a kind of a three legged stool between labor and government and corporations, and they were balancing each other out better than and unfortunately we've taken that, we've taken that away, and we taken away the middle class basically from our structure.
What would it take to rebalance things in a more reasonable direction back to you know, I mean obviously we recognize some of the inequities and the biases of that.
Generation as well.
But you said that you think that there's a fundamentalist version of capitalism that is propelled by people like Bob Iger, that is sort of reinforced by the government.
So what does it look like to rebalance those skills?
Yeah, I sometimes think that if we followed the line back from here to Ronald Reagan's election in nineteen eighty and just undo almost everything he did, all of those tax cuts, all you know, from Trump's back to Bushes, back to Reagan's original ones, all of the deregulation, the handicapping of OSHA and NRB, the attack on unions that
happened at the federal, state, and local level. If you just follow that line, the fairness doctrine and media, if you just follow that line of things that Reagan got going, and then other administrations, not always Republican, continued from there, I think that would be.
The way that we would need to do it.
And the other thing we'd have to do is spend money on education. You know, we have been strangling the education system and we've turned a college education into something that you know, most people can't afford, which is such.
A broken promise.
When I was growing up, anybody could get a college education by working.
A job at night.
This is insane what we're doing to ourselves. Health Care. We'd have to put health care in place too. And you know, my daughter was living in Paris for a long time, and she's thirty two years old. She told me that all of her friends in the US are not having children, but all of her friends in France.
Are having children.
And the difference is health care, childcare, job security, housing, security, education.
Those are the things that.
Are in place in France that we have taken out from under our working people in this country over the last fifty years.
Very interesting, pot And finally, Abigail, I found it very I found it actually very powerful. The way you directly called out Taylor Swift, who's the top private jet user, Leonardo DiCaprio, who was in don't look up, but that hasn't stopped him from, you know, flying around on his private jet. And listen, I mean, one wealthy person for going their private jet travel is not going to save
the planet. But it is true that the ultra wealthy have way more carbon output than your average citizen around the world. So what do you think is the role of just like publicly shaming some of these people who are blatant hypocrites in terms of their stated values in the way they actually live.
Corporations and the government have not hesitated to shame working people into recycling and using less plastic and turning their thermostat down and all the rest of it.
And every one of.
Those decisions is a decision that has a collective consequences. Everybody makes it, but really doesn't make a difference if it's just you. So those are all the same ways in which rich people are going to have to think about the way they run their lives.
It won't make a.
Difference if I decided to fly my private plane, but it's going to make a huge difference if we all stop. So they have to acknowledge they're part of the collective, that their actions have collective consequences. It's just the same as everyone else. It involves that mindset shift among wealthy people, which is right at the heart of so much of the problem we have. They have to come to an understanding that they're no better or more important than anyone else just because they.
Have these resources. And that's going to be a big mindset shift for people.
Yeah.
I think that's all well said Abiel. Thank you so much for your time. It's great to chat with you.
Thank you, thanks so much.
It's our pleasure.