by. the u.s. attorney general refuses to testify before the house judiciary committee on his handling of the report the session was labeled a circus with one democratic member brandishing a prop. chicken bar should have shown up today and answered questions and they go straight through the not terrified to sit for anybody still in the circus continues already. the u.s. is set to continue its support for the saudi intervention in yemen after the senate fails to override president veto of a resolution that would have ended the u.s. engagement in the war. within weeks co-founder julian assange attends a court hearing in the u.k. on whether he should be extradited to the u.s.

. the latest on these stories you can head to our t.v. dot com stay with us now for the kaiser report with financial news. max ties are this is the kaiser report now this economy is built on losses these unicorns it's taken public on the exchanges and got billions and billions in losses and everyone that comes up as more losses that's the way the oil industry the fracking industry is built on losses losses are the key of the american economy to find out more about this late breaking story let's check in with stacey herbert or as says tracy stacey what is going on well we do have an empire of debt and of course debt is a good way to ship dollars around the world so i think that's part of what backs

all of this but we're going to compare the debts of the unicorns versus debt the red queen let's call it that unicorns versus the red queen the wave of unicorn i.p.o.'s expose a silicon valley's group think the wave of unicorn i.p.o.'s reveals silicon valley's dangerous groups and creates article a dozen unicorns i have listed are likely to posted combined cumulative losses of forty seven billion dollars the justification for this max is called blitz scaling is the doctrine an order to conquer the winner takes all so you lose a whole bunch of money the theory is if you lose a whole bunch of money in order to drive all your competitors out destroy it's just like blitzkrieg the whole market destroy all the competition and then once all the competition is dead you raise your prices up to whatever it like you become like an

american hospital system or the health care system i had a couple examples of this obviously amazon was a blitz scaler they have totally taken over the retail environment and beaten the wal-mart to the retail punch by. reporting huge losses i remember in the ninety's when the company went public and henry blodget at that time was an analyst saying that the company stock could get to four hundred of course now it's over two thousand but people scott the idea because of all these huge losses that they were reporting and bezos like them why should i you know record profits because profits get taxed and i don't want to pay tax i want to put everything into scaling scaling scaling so these other companies are left and these other companies that are going public are similarly of the mindset that you can can't have enough losses you know a loss is are showing that you're blitz scaling it shows that you're doing something right if you're losing tons of money. ok so when you have

a genius like jeff bezos at the helm i suppose but if that are indeed at the helm and they're just for juicing losses even though they're stupid i don't know how that's going to work it works when one person is doing as soon as everybody is doing it then of chorus not only does do politicians start to notice because their constituents noticed that basically this is a way to never pay taxes again in your life as well forty seven you have forty seven billion in write offs that's how our president became so wealthy as massive tax write offs most right now most people don't understand that they think whoa whoa what a loser he lost a billion dollars and you like no he is right off for average now based on that and this is how these companies this is why they're all headed by guys who now are billionaires how do they become billionaires when their companies have massive losses because the companies have massive losses and they'll be able to write these billions off for quite a long time and in the meantime there's no competition they were underwriting your

you know you got a free ride. you know a few times with some of these goobers or lifts or something like that but then you're going to pay for ever bike and double triple quadruple the cost them in a phone rockwell were painting portraits of america today wouldn't be cops sitting at lunch and that's with kids it would be balance sheets of companies with massive losses in sec way well speaking of massive losses this is let's turn to the red queen syndrome and tracking because we've covered this and i know you're talking to tyson slocum so he's big on this whole energy market and it is a fascinating story i know just talking about it then it's called propaganda but here are investors that are complaining they were expecting the losses to and and some day for profits to flow but apparently according to reuters cash flow still weak at u.s. shale firms stock prices underperform u.s. shell producers last year again spent more money than they collected extending

a years long streak of putting oil output above cash flow and investor returns according to a reuters analysis of top independent producers all but seven of twenty nine of these producers last year spent more on drilling and shareholder payouts than they generated through operations according to securities filings unless a security filings were filed by you know adversary nations that this is actually reported earnings to the f.c.c. from these companies and they're showing losses now this is interesting because they are blitz scaling with losses you know in the fracking industry but it's not like the technology business i like that they can blow at scale and they can become more left and become a de wobbly and they actually market may disrupt sauza in the hundreds of thousands of taxis in the industry has a paradigm shift and it's never the same but in fracking or in energy once you run

out of oil or gas to drill that's it. implodes there's do you don't you don't you not gaining market share because it's a finite resource where as in the intellectual property business it's an infinite resource you just have an infinite number of people to sign up to your platform and every server you add to your server farm increases the value of the enterprise exponentially whereas in the red truly fracking system every additional dead well that you're beating to death and getting no energy from just generates more unrecoverable losses does destroy the competition in terms of whether space might have been available for a living for have you no humans to live for nature or for tourism to look at these beautiful spaces but once it's all filled with fracking fluids and chemicals and the water's been depleted perhaps it's not so but you know what the losses are not nearly as great as the i p o unicorn's the forty seven

billion in losses and these these are the uniforms that went public recently forty seven billion versus six point six nine billion in losses last year in fracking so not quite as bad but those losses are forever in fracking whereas and they in a car business and the social media business jeff bezos can just as earnings at any quarter he wants to and show massive profits because he's got a dominant share of the market but that's not true in this energy fracking business those losses are never going to be recalibrated you know what it will lead to is bank balance sheets needing a bailout so we don't know where the next bailouts going to come is it going to be the student loans and never get repaid is going to be the fracking loans i could never be repaid we don't know exactly where the pin that will puncture the next banking bubble comes from it could be fractures that's not as you point out a song as big as a student last bubble as long as big as a derivative losses on deutsche bank's balance sheet bubble but my point is that

ultimately we pay through a. bailout they need to get a bailout whereas in the technology business they can adjust their quarterly earnings reports to eliminate those losses and anytime they want to they're in the business of trying to game monopoly positions and are willing to take to losses to get there so it looks the same on a balance sheet put them together and both look like losses except at the fundamental business. is completely different yes so there are two forms of investors in the fracking industry there are those who buy the equity in the stock markets and the s.m.p. or the dow and then there are those who lend them money and a bond that they're being paid interest on so those are two different source of investors we don't know who the bond lenders are we don't know this presumably there are pension funds private equity but in terms of those who invested in their share of these firms stock prices of all twenty nine shale producers

fell in two thousand and eighteen they spite the fact that oil prices rose twenty eight percent all the shale producers their stock prices fell pressured by volatile crude prices and stronger returns and other sectors only one of the twenty nine cabot oil and gas traded higher at the end of twenty eighteen than it did two years earlier for too many shell companies generating more cash than they spend is aspirational said lee tillman chief executive officer of marathon oil generating more cash than you spend is merely aspirational equipment this is like a signature story for us have been hammering us for years because from the very beginning we noticed that it took more energy to frack than to get out but in it cost more capital to put in and get out so you're going to lose and now all the stocks are down and all they're all worthless and the bond holders who are the bond holders well as you point out yet pension funds and there's a pension crisis in america within ten or fifteen years i mean no money in social security well guess why because they stupid people bought bonds in fracking companies that went to zero because they are complicit in

a massive fraud. also banks don't need a bailout it's not an investment that will pay off and it certainly did not pay for shareholders and investor who put one hundred dollars into the s. and p. five hundred oil and gas exploration and production index and twenty thirteen so the beginning of this whole fracking general you know boom that saw us like lead the world and oil output and it's on the cover of time in newsweek celebrating so investors you actually bought shares in that index and twenty thirteen would have if you put one hundred dollars and then you would have fifty eight dollars and ninety nine cents at the end of twenty eighteen similar one hundred dollars investments were worth just nine dollars and whiting petroleum corporation thirty three fifty one and apache and thirty eight in devon according to financial followings by contrast and you put one hundred dollars in the s. and p. five hundred that would have grown to one hundred fifty dollars and thirty three

cents so the fact is now that so many investors have cut oil and gas holdings at the energy industries waiting in the s. and p. five hundred index of large publicly traded u.s. companies fell to five percent this year from eleven percent in two thousand and twelve and if you have been watching our show the past five or six years and the first time we mention that these are actually on viable corporations you are shorting the stocks of these companies on margin you'd be up under two hundred three hundred percent so that's true but partly because the red queen center you're always going to have to keep on drilling faster and faster you have to spend more more like shareholders and now they've capitulated they're say ok you're never going to be able to return any money to us are you and because they've probably watched guys report realize that those wells only last eighteen months so then they have to drill another one so it's based on asked ben spaced on last yeah but we have no political agenda here we just math if it if it costs more to get out than what you get when you get it out that's a called a loss it's

a minus sign. that's it if you can't figure that out you think there's a political agenda and you're blinded by your bias when they always have guaranteed costs at least like a lot of these unicorns in the tech sector you know they just have the cost of the platform yet another server and your enterprise value goes up exponentially yet here it's linear it costs you have to drill at a cost real money got a guy's got to drive trucks and they don't drill on the ground they've got to pay him an arsehole it out in the us and it doesn't scale and no matter how much debt you throw at it it never will scale it doesn't scale and therefore and also it doesn't stop profitable so it's a cash hole in the ground it's like owning a yacht connecticut it's like standing under a cold shower stuffing hundred dollar bills down the drain trust me on the happiest day of your life when you buy your yacht second happiness day when you sell your

you. don't go away much more coming your way. out of status if you believe your photo session this is a. good go show to looks funny you know we often see this when you know when it will suit just like you was drinking in that suit so where we will use it even though it will be the most lethal focus on the political aspects that are told that we're going to discuss subjects neither of them don't interest to us you just sort of still bring sister just you know therefore we tried to do something flips and play the joke there soon.

welcome back to the kaiser report imax keyser time now to return to our conversation with tyson slocum he runs the public citizen's energy program here in washington d.c. and serves on the c.f.d. sees energy committee tyson welcome back always great to be here you're not a ticket for the american consumer you want to get the fairest price for energy and energy is a big part of the budget of every household in america in alabama gas for gas and energy and heating i mean that's that's a line item on the budget and it's a serious line item and you want to make sure you're getting the fairest price possible and you know but you're exposed to all this macroeconomic stuff and geopolitical risk and because energy is really the most train a commodity in the world it's a finds countries certainly in the middle east but also around the world could be in bed as well and their entire globe since one thousand seventy one in the petro standard is really defined as energy that's what drives the world and even believe

that to mitigate that risk it's time to get off the carbon or you know gas or oil. you know. start to go electric for electrification of automobiles and other types of things and you know talk to me about the economics of it because forget about the environmentally hug a tree stuff forget about that right tell me why that's going to save me money because no matter how much oil the united states produces from fracking or from the gulf of mexico even if we produce enough oil to meet all of our domestic needs which we don't that price of oil is still tied to what's going on globally and so as long as we are tethered to an addiction on oil which was george bush's term in his two thousand and five state of the union address as long as we're addicted to oil we're at the mercy of what's going on globally and so anything we can do to minimize our exposure to global oil markets by getting on. off of our addiction to

oil is going to be a net benefit for the average consumer to come through the propaganda another words to keep the oil industry going the way it is and to issue electrification t.s.a. ivy league word there right there right in there and i have never not a crack like you know there's a propaganda war right out of the mainstream media will say these are bad guys they've done just like we did they talk funny we got to tell some of them right so that's how do you break through that there's a serious propaganda going on this country mr media is propagandizing every single day for the interest of big oil and look at the russia gay folks it's a fricken bangle oil american big oil hoax that a breakthrough that we're already starting to see it where every major automaker has pledged. not just a verbal commitments of electric vehicle production but actual production facilities you look at a company like tesla right which which has a bigger market capitalization than automakers like g.m.

and ford to produce millions of cars every year whereas a tesla is producing thousands why is the market value in tesla more not because they're namrud would be on musk personally but because they understand that his business model is forward thinking and that's what the future of the industry is looking like china my understanding is that they're pretty far ahead of the electric vehicle the private they're doing a lot out there and they're doing a lot in the solar energy with the renewable solar energy and strive is up is that part of the move china's making to dominate the twenty first century is what china understands and what they're able to do better than we are is invest in infrastructure right so historically governments have to invest in infrastructure because the philippi of the market to recover their capital investment plus make a profit on infrastructure is very limited you know just look at the constitution article one section eight says congress shall build the postal road right. morse

when he invented the telegraph congress appropriated all the money for that the. all roads were given land away for free and zero interest loans the one nine hundred fifty four interstate highway act so we need a version of government intervention to build the charging infrastructure because a market based charging infrastructure program is going to charge too high of a price motorists are going to use it and charging stations that i think has got every three hundred miles as i had a charger because right exactly and i and so i have got a subsidized already built a highway system right government went to the moon right down and beat and won world war two but if you talk about government these days you're socialist and you're a communist and you know unfortunately right now is a prostitution recess congress makes the postal system may suppose the roads right which is like the roads and the internet combined into one back in seventeen eighty nine solve the constitution that's right that's what we're saying and but the problem is right is that the federal government claims they don't have any money because they just spent a whole lot on trump's tax cuts but where we're seeing infrastructure spending is

actually at the state level with electric utility regulators because the electric utilities right they've been losing money because americans aren't using as much electricity as they were a generation ago so for an electric utility they want to sell more electricity to power of the transportation sector so they're going to state regulators and saying you know let's have rate payers fund a two hundred million dollar charging station and you know what's interesting in more than a dozen states who's leading the opposition to these proposed rule makings it's the american petroleum institute which is the big oil's d.c. baseline for all the trolley cars in california that's right along with a good year and another photo so yet but in this time they're being right out in front right they don't even care or like where the american petroleum isn't propaganda and they are right let's not california it's often ground zero for not

just any market for audiences. henry wright and run out a field day there you know what's going up with p.g. and e. and also just tell us if you can with like states you mention the states there in the states have a lot of power war fighting and things like liberalization and they decide on marijuana markets for example in other areas they seem to take the lead and they and then it becomes a national agenda does not play into it at all in your view oh absolutely i mean california has been a policy incubator for a long time they've been a leader on a bunch of things look at clean car standards right they've got the special carve out under federal law and they're the ones that are really the bottleneck in the trumpet ministrations efforts to roll back. the obama clean car standards because california says we in thirteen states that follow us are going to move ahead with it so. what california is doing to address climate change you know basically you know jerry brown when he was governor was going abroad and basically saying hey the

trump ministration pulled out of the paris climate accord but california we're dedicated to being in it ok let's again this is to save money because you get an alternative to the petroleum industry which is exposed to massive risks that are escalating due to geo political unrest and the price of oil is vulnerable to upside shocks and the only way to mitigate that risk is through something like renewables and california you can say is leading the way in this regard but the propaganda machines will tell you that it's a bunch of tree hugging liberals that have no sense of the cost like how we're going to pay for or are we going to pay for it that's a misnomer that's false the costs are we can't afford the risk of skyrocketing oil prices and those skyrocketing prices are baked into the cake they're not prices oil is not going to go down first of all it peak oil in the sense that the cost is going to go up and up and up is only so much you can fight fracking is a losing proposition because the depletion rates are very high and it cost more

than you can it's. the senate get out and was energy and capital so this is a money saving initiative. let's move on to gulf gulf of mexico cleanup costs recent report about oil rigs in the gulf of mexico are leaving behind billions of dollars in cleanup costs of the taxpayers. i guess are reminds me of british petroleum i guess they were involved there tells about the gulf of mexico these same oil companies do the same frack what's going on there right so just like you have with on shore drilling where companies routinely do not allocate enough funds to deal with abandoned wells that's what we're seeing in the gulf of mexico the gulf of mexico most of it is federal jurisdictional waters so that's why the u.s. department of interior is the entity in charge of regulating the industry and also selling acreage is and collecting royalties and we've got a massive scandal because we've got thousands of old wells that are no longer

produce saying that are leaking oil that haven't been properly capped and the industry has simply walked away from its responsibilities and so who pays for the american taxpayer and misses you know yet another sort of hidden subsidy enjoyed by the oil and gas industry and yet that they accept lies they're a cost right i start allies the costs and they end up and fight right and so you know public citizen has worked with others for years to try and hold the oil industry accountable we've had some successes at times when we've controlled the house of representatives like we do now but with the numbers in the united states senate and given the lobbying influence of the american petroleum institute we're always going to fail because very few americans remember right right now the united states is the largest oil producer in the world right we're a petro state we're producing eleven point three million barrels of oil every day and so for the industry that's hundreds of billions of dollars each. and straight

up profit just from pulling or oil out of the ground in the united states and they translate that profit into massive economic and political power i used to say that the national rifle association was the most powerful u.s. lobbying interests but since ollie north took it over. they've sort of been in decline the american petroleum institute is now the most powerful lobbying interests in america and they just don't lose and it's because of their massive political and economic influence over d.c. it's a money losing situation in the energy at the moment and the propaganda around this idea of manifest destiny as powerful that america runs the world and that we're immune to a ravages of pollution like pollution doesn't hurt us we're superman all movies that come out of hollywood are about superheroes missiles like american others

hollywood got started essentially superman meth was from you know immigrants to america who were creating the mythological izing missile its eyes and their past through this archetype of superheroes and this now we're living in all these superhero movies to try in this post to be america as a superhero and then we have super powers so if there's a huge ecological problem we can use our super powers to get rid of it and this is usually propagandistic if that's even a word but nevertheless so how do you cut through that a cademy ralph nader ito he's not a superhero he's just a guy with a calculator that can tell you no thank you losing money and you're an idiot but he's so but he's up against you know scarlet you're hassen in a cat let leather caps it how's he going to win. you know i'm also a professor at university of maryland and so i interact with with young people all the time young people get it we've got a new generation of leaders coming up that understand the threat of climate. change

is real and that the economic benefits and advantages of renewable energy are here and they're only going to keep getting better as the costs continue to decline so as long as the young people are armed with this information and turn out to vote in big numbers i think the other people are all as you know until i become less than young people and they take the money and the last time i'm willfully blind i'm no longer a young innocent person but the issue with renewable energy is that you're able to mere you're able to match financial self interest right because if you buy your home we gotta go i put solar panels on enough i think you're fighting the good fight but i always welcome on this show great even though it's a losing proposition and i'll never wake up. and that's going to do it for this edition of the kaiser report with me max kaiser and stacy herbert like to thank our friend tyson slocum the runs public citizens join to catch us on twitter it's

kaiser report until next time. so we've got to do is identify the threats that we have it's crazy to confront a shouldn't let it be an arms race in this on a sunday school very dramatic development the only relief i'm going to resist i don't see how that strategy will be successful very critical time time to sit down and talk. most people think just stand out in this business you need to be the first one on top of the story or the person with the loudest voice of the biggest raid in truth to stand the news business is just the dance the right questions demand the right

answer. the. question. these in the world. own the world. total room. all your ego to.

one welcome to worlds apart judging from opinion polls around the world many people view as and posters aiming for holier than though image in public and living as if rules don't apply to down in private such hypocrisy maybe upset him but doesn't justify it a little bit off line to be revealed to discuss that i'm now joined by alex taste the letter off i would like to know because it's all better no one asked russian pranksters laxness and von yes it's good to talk to you thank you very much for your time and willingness to talk to us thanks for your time i really like the design of for your things how you respond to the question posed here well my answer is. i can't answer because if i will say that's i don't nobody will believe me if i will say that i was it was so i will.