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Speaker 3: All right, Good morning, Welcome back to Counterpoints. Emily, how
Speaker 3: was your mushroom does this morning? Did you calibrate it
Speaker 3: better than last week?
Speaker 4: He loves this joke. He's going to do this joke
Speaker 4: every week.
Speaker 3: It was an inside joke because I was a little
Speaker 3: I had Mac wrote a little bit.
Speaker 4: You know, sometimes you gotta There.
Speaker 3: Was an audience of one for me for that joke
Speaker 3: last week. I'm better today, although people enjoyed it either way.
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Speaker 4: It's the difference between hearing Ryan making a joke about
Speaker 4: me micro dosing and scene.
Speaker 3: And you really have to see it, Yeah, you do,
Speaker 3: you do? You got to see it.
Speaker 4: So huge news day actually, and this happens a lot,
Speaker 4: I feel like on Tuesdays as we're prepping the show,
Speaker 4: but yesterday was something I have never seen quite before.
Speaker 4: The story is just kept stacking up. Ryan was actually
Speaker 4: in the Capitol yesterday, and I know you're going to
Speaker 4: talk to us about shutdown dynamics. Later in the show,
Speaker 4: We're going to start with the UAW. We are then
Speaker 4: going to go to some big news again that broke
Speaker 4: at night, basically that Donald Trump is in some serious
Speaker 4: hot water new legal trouble based on a judge's findings
Speaker 4: about how he was valuing his own assets. We're going
Speaker 4: to talk about the Big Iron story that was very
Speaker 4: buzzy in Washington yesterday. The Biden administration may be infiltrated
Speaker 4: by Ronnian assets. I think Ryan might disagree and have
Speaker 4: some fun. It'll be a good debate. We're going to
Speaker 4: talk about JP Morgan settling once again in the Jeffrey
Speaker 4: Epstein case. We're going to talk about Google and anti trust.
Speaker 4: I'm going to talk about a new poll on Republican
Speaker 4: voters and how they are seeing politics right now. And
Speaker 4: then we're talking to journalist Toby Green about how the
Speaker 4: lockdowns affected Africa.
Speaker 3: Let's deal with Hunter Biden.
Speaker 4: First, Hunter Biden, this is one of those stories that
Speaker 4: stacked up yesterday. Did you see the Fox story?
Speaker 3: I did, right, So Fox is reporting. I think we
Speaker 3: have an element here that two hundred fifty thousand dollars
Speaker 3: plus another ten thousand dollars wire originated from a company
Speaker 3: in Beijing, Beijing that has ties to kind of like
Speaker 3: the National Chinese Bank that Hunter Biden and is little
Speaker 3: firm we're working for. They wired Hunter money in twenty nineteen,
Speaker 3: and the beneficiary address on the wire was Joe Biden's
Speaker 3: home address, the Big Guy. All one hundred percent for
Speaker 3: the Big Guy. Now, the reason I'm a little underwhelmed
Speaker 3: by this story is that Hunter Biden was lit. We
Speaker 3: know that he was living. Yes, he was a drug
Speaker 3: addict living with his parents. Yes, And so if you're
Speaker 3: gonna get a two hundred fifty thousand dollars wire, which
Speaker 3: is it's a hilarious concept. You're a drug addict who's
Speaker 3: living with your parents, and also you have hundreds of
Speaker 3: thousands of dollars being wired in from foreign countries. Yes,
Speaker 3: as you know most drug addicts who are living with
Speaker 3: their parents too. But any event, he's living with his
Speaker 3: dad at the time, or it is the most stable address.
Speaker 3: You know, he's going through a divorce, he's got this
Speaker 3: other relationship going on, he's got the affair with his
Speaker 3: late brother's wife former wife going on, and so the
Speaker 3: address that he can cite is the one in Wilmington
Speaker 3: is his dad. So as another example of kind of
Speaker 3: what a rough life Hunter Biden was living, I think
Speaker 3: they've got inbusted. I don't think it actually ties to
Speaker 3: Joe Biden necessarily, Am I being too soft on the
Speaker 3: big guy here?
Speaker 4: It's no, no, no, I don't think you're being too soft
Speaker 4: on the big guy. But it does if you kind
Speaker 4: of zoom out to the three thousand foot level. This
Speaker 4: is a man who was about to announce his run
Speaker 4: for president on the timeline and is having money from
Speaker 4: a Chinese pe firm wired to his house, hundreds of
Speaker 4: thousands of dollars to the man who is about to
Speaker 4: become the leading candidate for president.
Speaker 3: And announced a couple of months later or something.
Speaker 4: Right, you're right, right, right, So obviously not a good look.
Speaker 4: And I think in another era, you know, fifteen ten
Speaker 4: years ago, this would have been pretty earth chattering for
Speaker 4: Joe Biden and for any sitting president. Does it tie
Speaker 4: Biden directly anymore than he already has been tied directly.
Speaker 4: We're not in the Philip Bump camp, of course, where
Speaker 4: we say no, none of this points back to Joe
Speaker 4: bid Don't It could mean anything? No, I mean, I
Speaker 4: think there's pretty clear evidence that Joe Biden because his
Speaker 4: finances and this is I think that one of the
Speaker 4: points of the story is it's interesting the way that
Speaker 4: their lives were intermingled, because we have seen evidence their
Speaker 4: finances were intermingle, right.
Speaker 3: And this with this company in particular, I think it
Speaker 3: was BHR BHR. We know that Biden was on Joe
Speaker 3: Biden was on at least what one call did coffee
Speaker 3: in Beijing with Hunter, and the CEO may have called
Speaker 3: in on during a dinner as well, or was put
Speaker 3: on speaker during another meeting. So you know, just to
Speaker 3: do pleasantries, because that's how this works. Like you, if
Speaker 3: you're Hunter Biden, you want to just prove that, like, Okay, yes,
Speaker 3: you know I'm a mess, but like my dad still
Speaker 3: loves me and I still talk to him, and let
Speaker 3: me prove it by putting him on speakerphone. Here. It's
Speaker 3: not like you're going to talk about business on the
Speaker 3: speakerphone with the vice president form and vice president, but
Speaker 3: it's just to show that connection. As a parent, you
Speaker 3: could be like, look, you want to move back home.
Speaker 3: You're troubled. You just can't extract money from foreign countries
Speaker 3: using my last name. You could put that rule in place,
Speaker 3: my red line. You got to change the kiddy litter
Speaker 3: every day. Yeah, and no money from China in exchange
Speaker 3: for selling my name. It seems like you could do that.
Speaker 4: It seems like a good deal.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and I meant to live in Wellington.
Speaker 4: But not only did Joe Biden apparently not do that,
Speaker 4: but he also then lined to the public about it
Speaker 4: and said he had no interaction with the son's business
Speaker 4: at all. We now know that that is not true.
Speaker 4: We know that he was very very much engaged, whether
Speaker 4: it was intentional or otherwise, in the lobbying project. I
Speaker 4: have a hard time giving him the benefit of the doubt.
Speaker 4: When he's showing up to Cafe Milano, he's on the phone,
Speaker 4: all of those different things. So is this hard evidence
Speaker 4: that Joe Biden profited. Well, we do have some evidence
Speaker 4: that Hunter Biden was paying bills on these properties. So
Speaker 4: if you put it all together, it's just another puzzle
Speaker 4: piece that is becoming an increasingly clear picture of Joe
Speaker 4: Biden's at the very least complicity in influence peddling with
Speaker 4: a country that is I think fairly labeled in an adversary,
Speaker 4: especially on particular levels. And he lied to the public
Speaker 4: about it too.
Speaker 3: Yeah, there was that, and we then move on from this.
Speaker 3: But there was that great viral speech that was given
Speaker 3: as sort of like a Chinese Ted Talk thing if
Speaker 3: you remember this, where the guys like, when Biden comes in,
Speaker 3: we're gonna be good, yeah, because we're good with Hunter. Yeah.
Speaker 3: So they like there were certainly people in the Chinese
Speaker 3: elite who felt like they were getting something.
Speaker 4: The last Obama state dinner was a China state dinner,
Speaker 4: if I'm not mistaken. I mean, when they were leaving office,
Speaker 4: there was a different there was a warmer feeling towards China.
Speaker 4: And you know, people can make ideological arguments for why
Speaker 4: that was and how best to handle this kind of
Speaker 4: what feels like a new Cold War. But obviously we're
Speaker 4: seriously at loggerheads with them on things like state secrets,
Speaker 4: on things like technology and all of these big questions Taiwan.
Speaker 4: So it's an incredibly bizarre and obviously unethical arrangement.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And that's the funny thing. All of this chatter
Speaker 3: kind of lives at the realm of just social media
Speaker 3: chit chat. If you go back to Russia, Russia Gate
Speaker 3: and Trump, if you believed that Trump was kind of
Speaker 3: like a Russian asset living in the White House, you'd
Speaker 3: be shocked that he was so hawkish towards Russia, right,
Speaker 3: And if you believe that Hunter Biden and Joe Biden
Speaker 3: are just Chinese assets sitting in the White House, you'd
Speaker 3: be shocked at how hostile and hawkish they are towards China.
Speaker 3: So this entire conversation plays out on a level that's
Speaker 3: just different from the structural, kind of geopolitical level that's
Speaker 3: actually at play.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I think that's a good point, because Biden's China
Speaker 4: policy is totally what's the best word for it's kind
Speaker 4: of by polar and that it's like polled, it's just
Speaker 4: two poles that are it's a tug of war between
Speaker 4: people who are more dubbish and people who are more hawkish,
Speaker 4: because you can see both winning out at various points
Speaker 4: in time. And that's genuinely interesting. And it's not as
Speaker 4: clear cut a story as Joe Biden is bought and
Speaker 4: paid for by China. The story is obviously that Joe
Speaker 4: Biden was aware of an incredibly unethical arrangement. His son
Speaker 4: was profiting to the tune of millions in the way
Speaker 4: no average American could by trading on his name and influence.
Speaker 3: Meanwhile, you've had Republicans accusing Biden of being bought and
Speaker 3: paid for by the UAW. Are they run Let's hope not.
Speaker 3: Let's hope not. So let's let's play some extraordinarily exciting
Speaker 3: scenes from a UAW picket line. The first president in
Speaker 3: American history to walk a striking picket line. Let's let's
Speaker 3: roll this. You can't, you know, you gotta you gotta
Speaker 3: squint a little bit to hear this. But let's here's
Speaker 3: here's Biden kind of missing the bullhorn a little bit
Speaker 3: at the picket line.
Speaker 5: Ruddy, you ain't w a bigger lines, but not as
Speaker 5: the Senator since nineteen seventy three. But I'll tell you
Speaker 5: what first I've ever done as the president? Oh sure,
Speaker 5: working a real side in the three. Back of the
Speaker 5: matter is that you, guys.
Speaker 6: U A W.
Speaker 5: You seved the autobile industry back into out of the
Speaker 5: eight and four, made a lot of sacrifices, gave up
Speaker 5: a lot, and the companies were in trouble. But now
Speaker 5: they're doing incredibly well. And guess what you should be
Speaker 5: doing incredibly well too. Takes with it because you deserve
Speaker 5: the significant raise, your need and others, let's get it,
Speaker 5: never stepped.
Speaker 3: Up for us what I was struck by beyond just
Speaker 3: the imagery of the president out there on the picket
Speaker 3: line with the workers. Is that at the end there
Speaker 3: he says, let's get back what we lost, using the
Speaker 3: word we talking about the workers, and he's talking about
Speaker 3: how in two thousand and eight, during the financial crisis,
Speaker 3: the UAW gave up extraordinary concessions in order to just
Speaker 3: not go completely bankrupt, like bankruptcy and let not the
Speaker 3: kind of fake bankruptcy, but like real bankruptcy was like
Speaker 3: on the table, like that was a real possibility, and
Speaker 3: they made all of these sacrifices. And so he's saying,
Speaker 3: let's we need to win that back. And to have
Speaker 3: a president say we in relation to the rest of
Speaker 3: these workers rather than you, was a unique sign of
Speaker 3: solidarity from a president to actual striking workers. What did
Speaker 3: you think of of that theater or a real shift
Speaker 3: in the role to presidency?
Speaker 4: I mean it, it was good theater, a rare moment
Speaker 4: of good theater from the Biden presidency.
Speaker 3: I did short, which was good for him.
Speaker 4: Kept it short. He so here's more from him. He said, quote,
Speaker 4: stick with it. You deserve the significant rays you need
Speaker 4: and other benefits, and he got some reading that. Yeah,
Speaker 4: he got some additional headlines because a reporter shoutowed a
Speaker 4: question to him where he asked specifically with the reporter
Speaker 4: asked specifically about a forty percent pay raise, and Biden
Speaker 4: just responded to the question of whether workers deserved it.
Speaker 4: He said, quote, yes, this is yes. You can see
Speaker 4: that up on the screen as well. So whether or not,
Speaker 4: I mean, I think Biden is entirely sincere in this,
Speaker 4: I think, and that's very typical of Democrats, especially from
Speaker 4: his era, when union support meant something. I mean, that's
Speaker 4: that is the core of the Democratic Party when he's
Speaker 4: coming and especially where he's from, when he's coming into
Speaker 4: office and is coming into power politically. So I think
Speaker 4: he's entirely sincere in his sentiments towards unions, and I
Speaker 4: think you definitely saw that very very clearly yesterday. It
Speaker 4: is interesting, on the other hand, that speaking of we
Speaker 4: were just kind of talking about this in the China segment,
Speaker 4: the sort of different polls pulling him in different directions,
Speaker 4: and this happens in every presidency, but it's been interesting
Speaker 4: the sort of green agenda that Biden's implemented, the electric
Speaker 4: vehicle mandate that came from an executive order. Those things
Speaker 4: are intention and those are explicitly intention according to the union,
Speaker 4: and Biden didn't address that yesterday. No big surprise there,
Speaker 4: but it is interesting to see a Democrat like Joe Biden,
Speaker 4: from his era and his kind of democratic politics then
Speaker 4: be the administration to implement some of these green priorities
Speaker 4: that the unions are obviously not stoked about.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And later he's stuck around to watch Sean Fain,
Speaker 3: the UAW president, speak to that same gathering at workers.
Speaker 3: He's got another I don't think we have the clip here,
Speaker 3: but he's got a worker, got his arm around her,
Speaker 3: and she's talking about how we're going to beat corporate greed.
Speaker 3: The thing that beats corporate greed is a united working class.
Speaker 3: And Biden's like pumping his fist like this is the
Speaker 3: Democratic Party? What wow? Okay? And I think politicians would
Speaker 3: rather do that like it, just as human beings. Like
Speaker 3: if you can be a politician and you can either
Speaker 3: kind of be corrupted by big money, or you can
Speaker 3: be corrupted by thousands of workers cheering for you, you'd
Speaker 3: rather have thousands of just as a human, you'd rather
Speaker 3: have thousands of workers cheering for you. Now, it's nice
Speaker 3: to be rich and you know, be bought off like
Speaker 3: it'd be an oligarch, like all of those things are great.
Speaker 3: But I do think that there is a they wind
Speaker 3: at the back of that kind of movement if you
Speaker 3: can get it going, like you have to be able.
Speaker 3: And you're seeing at the same time, yesterday it was
Speaker 3: reported you see this that the private equity industry is
Speaker 3: moving all its money to the Republican the cycle because
Speaker 3: they're so frustrated by Gensler and other Biden regulators and
Speaker 3: they think that Democrats are like getting taken over by
Speaker 3: the berniecrats and it's just not fair. Private equity can't
Speaker 3: get a hearing outside of Josh Gottheimer anymore. And it's
Speaker 3: like good, polarize that, like good, fine, yeah, let's have
Speaker 3: that fight.
Speaker 4: Well, and it's a time when Republicans are at odds
Speaker 4: with the Chamber of Commerce, and that's a.
Speaker 3: Very real where will private equity go?
Speaker 4: Well, it's actually fair, I mean because private equity again,
Speaker 4: I mean we've seen different things like ESG is a
Speaker 4: huge issue of contention between Republicans and some of these
Speaker 4: really big business interests. And I don't know, I mean,
Speaker 4: there's a real question of if they those big business
Speaker 4: interests that thought they had actually found a new home
Speaker 4: in the Democratic Party. It wasn't just that they thought, oh,
Speaker 4: we're souring on Republicans, it was actually they felt really
Speaker 4: comfortable with Democrats. If they now feel uncomfortable with Democrats,
Speaker 4: and that's a wedge that drives them back to Republicans.
Speaker 4: There's a lot lot of incentives on the table for
Speaker 4: Republicans to be friendly with those interests again, and we'll
Speaker 4: talk about this later in the show in my block,
Speaker 4: because that's Republicans like actually really can't afford to do
Speaker 4: that with their voters because sentiments have soured on Wall
Speaker 4: Street to another degree with Republican voters, but union sentiments
Speaker 4: even among Republican voters, and in the poll I'm going
Speaker 4: to talk about later today, it's something like forty percent
Speaker 4: of Republicans are favorable towards unions. Let alone the broader public.
Speaker 4: This is not a time to be going after unions.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and this exact fight that you're talking about is
Speaker 3: playing out within the Republican Party. In tonight's trip by
Speaker 3: Trump out to what a lot of the media is
Speaker 3: describing as a talk to the UAW or to like
Speaker 3: unionized workers, or saying he's visiting the Pike line. None
Speaker 3: of that is true, and it's interesting. Let's talk about
Speaker 3: what Trump actually is doing during the debate. He's going
Speaker 3: to be visiting a non union plant, and let's we
Speaker 3: have this Fox News clip. Let's roll this so we
Speaker 3: can let's hear from directly from the non union owner.
Speaker 4: Let's bring in.
Speaker 1: Nathan Stemple, a president of automotive manufacturing company Drake Enterprises,
Speaker 1: where former President Trump will be speaking tomorrow. Nathan, good
Speaker 1: morning too. It's going to be a big week for
Speaker 1: you and your business because the former president is coming
Speaker 1: to speak at Drake Enterprises. Not every day you get
Speaker 1: a former president current front runner to visit. So give
Speaker 1: us the backstory here, tell us how this visit came
Speaker 1: about and why you do want to host the former president.
Speaker 7: Well, first off, thanks for having me on. It was
Speaker 7: complete luck. Some of our colleagues that we do business
Speaker 7: with reached out to us said that the president was
Speaker 7: looking for a location to host this event, and you
Speaker 7: know we are more than willing.
Speaker 8: To do so.
Speaker 3: Now. Some of is if I'm going to defend Trump,
Speaker 3: would be the unions are Democratic allies. No, yeah, and
Speaker 3: so aren't going to give Trump any kind of photo op.
Speaker 3: On the other hand, the picket lines are all over
Speaker 3: you know, they're they're throughout Michigan, Indiana. You could, like,
Speaker 3: you can find picket lines everywhere. And so if he
Speaker 3: actually wanted to literally visit a picket line, he could
Speaker 3: do that. He could get the same photo op that
Speaker 3: Biden just got. Instead, when his campaign decided to plan it,
Speaker 3: they reached out to you know, some looks like Republican
Speaker 3: donors out in the Midwest, and they were like, oh, yeah,
Speaker 3: I call this guy called Nathan. You know, he's his
Speaker 3: workers aren't striking, so they don't have a union, and
Speaker 3: they're like, oh, you can host us. You're like yeah,
Speaker 3: well yeah. It's like, well, no, this is a big
Speaker 3: this is a strike against the Big three. What are
Speaker 3: you doing going to a not striking, non union plans?
Speaker 4: Well, yeah, So that's where the media is I think
Speaker 4: bluring the lines here is so he is speaking to
Speaker 4: auto workers. Yeah, and when you say Donald Trump is
Speaker 4: going to Michigan to speak to auto workers a mid
Speaker 4: UAW strike gives the impression that he is speaking to
Speaker 4: striking auto workers. That is not the case, and there
Speaker 4: were some rumblings that this had been organized by the
Speaker 4: National Right to Work Foundation, which is exactly what it
Speaker 4: sounds like as a group.
Speaker 3: We don't have any evidence of that, as Philip Pump
Speaker 3: would say.
Speaker 4: Right right, Philip Pump would say, by the Bump standards,
Speaker 4: it's unconfirmed. I did reach out to them and didn't
Speaker 4: hear back to try to confirm whether or not that's true.
Speaker 4: But yeah, like I said, I didn't hear back. Now,
Speaker 4: the right to work issue is a huge blind spot
Speaker 4: for and I don't know if we've actually ever even
Speaker 4: hashed this out, because you've covered these issues for years.
Speaker 4: I do genuinely think it is a blind a blind
Speaker 4: spot for pro union democrats and pro union leftists because
Speaker 4: a lot of the problem with right to work is
Speaker 4: actually I think it's blamed on companies, like misinformation for
Speaker 4: companies blah blah blah, which I think is sort of
Speaker 4: insulting to union workers. But also if unions, if workers
Speaker 4: don't want to join a union, that's also a problem
Speaker 4: with the union. And it is because unions like the
Speaker 4: UAW have had serious corruption problems. There are now cultural
Speaker 4: wedges between the workers and the unions. And the candidates
Speaker 4: that they support with money that partially comes from workers,
Speaker 4: Like that is a real problem for a lot of
Speaker 4: people who work at in places like Detroit, in places
Speaker 4: like Indiana, and so the right to work issue I
Speaker 4: think is not as clear cut as it's made out
Speaker 4: to be by a lot of people who cover these
Speaker 4: issues really intensely. Not you, but I think sometimes that
Speaker 4: just gets glossed over, and it is kind of an
Speaker 4: opening for Trump to come in here and say, you
Speaker 4: like a lot of you workers, not all of you workers,
Speaker 4: but a lot of you aren't getting what you want
Speaker 4: from the unions, and so I don't think it's like
Speaker 4: a clear slam dunk. I guess that's what I'm trying
Speaker 4: to say, Like, it's not like the big dunk on
Speaker 4: Republicans that I've seen some on the left treated as
Speaker 4: that that Trump is going to like a right to
Speaker 4: work non union in place like Actually, union workers in
Speaker 4: places like Michigan do have a lot of problems with
Speaker 4: the unions.
Speaker 3: I think the timing is a little off for him
Speaker 3: in the sense that finally, yes, the UAW wildly corrupt
Speaker 3: for decades until like recently, thank you department weaponized department
Speaker 3: of Justice came in and weaponized the UAW leadership right
Speaker 3: out of there after this like then they deserved it,
Speaker 3: like wildly corrupt. And then for the first time ever,
Speaker 3: they had direct elections and they chose Sean Fain. Here's
Speaker 3: the thing that nobody wants to talk about. You know
Speaker 3: why Shawn Fain won. People are going to not be
Speaker 3: happy about this. Graduate students make up at about twenty five
Speaker 3: percent of the UAW right now. They were the biggest
Speaker 3: organizers and champions of Shawn Fain, and so it's this
Speaker 3: interesting Bernie like gentrifier millennial situation. But they very much
Speaker 3: organized with militant auto workers and other rank and file.
Speaker 3: But without the graduate students in that union, John Finn
Speaker 3: doesn't win.
Speaker 4: Interesting, yeah, without the we.
Speaker 3: Don't We liked our kind of class history to be
Speaker 3: cleaner than that. So you can just pretend you didn't
Speaker 3: hear that. If anybody doesn't like that, But if you
Speaker 3: do like that, congratulations to the graduate students and also
Speaker 3: congratulations to the autoworkers who are like who did work
Speaker 3: with them and be like, you know what, these kids
Speaker 3: can really help us. There were a lot of fights
Speaker 3: on the floor where the graduate students were able to
Speaker 3: help some of these long time auto workers kind of
Speaker 3: work through the very complicated legal ease of the bylaws
Speaker 3: and help them maneuver within the within the within the convention.
Speaker 3: So it's really really cool alliance if if people are
Speaker 3: okay with like acknowledging that grad students are not just
Speaker 3: the worst people on the planet, because without them, like
Speaker 3: you're not, you're not getting this fight right now. So
Speaker 3: one point on what I'd say on right to work, Yes,
Speaker 3: I think it's true that unions need to keep organizing
Speaker 3: internally and need to you know, positively win the support
Speaker 3: of their membership.
Speaker 4: They need to genuinely be appealing.
Speaker 3: At the same time, the way that right to work
Speaker 3: can sometimes be designed is like imagine you, like, let's
Speaker 3: say a book, like you're going out to eat and
Speaker 3: you've got a huge group. You've got fifty people, and
Speaker 3: so you call the restaurant ahead and you're like, look,
Speaker 3: if we give you a thousand dollars, can we book
Speaker 3: a block off half the restaurant and then everybody can
Speaker 3: eat for ten dollars total, and then everybody and then
Speaker 3: people come in and you people figure out, oh, actually
Speaker 3: I don't have to pay the ten dollars, I don't
Speaker 3: have to chip in, and I still get the cheaper food.
Speaker 3: And then eventually nobody's paying the little cover to get
Speaker 3: into the side over here, and then the person who
Speaker 3: organized the dinner can't then pay the restaurant, and so
Speaker 3: the whole thing just dissolves and you don't and nobody
Speaker 3: any longer has like this half of the restaurant anymore.
Speaker 3: The whole thing's over. There's so you got to so
Speaker 3: ever individual wants to free ride, Yeah, that's for the
Speaker 3: why not. It takes the incentive away if you can
Speaker 3: free ride, free ride. But then eventually the union is
Speaker 3: so weak that it just collapses. And that's the goal
Speaker 3: of these like right to work champions.
Speaker 4: Absolutely, absolutely, Although I do again think that it's a
Speaker 4: it's also an opening and even just politically, it's an
Speaker 4: opening for Trump to pray on. And I say that
Speaker 4: not like I doesn't mean that pejoratively. I mean that
Speaker 4: politically to pray on some real weaknesses that the union has.
Speaker 4: And the union should obviously strengthen the weakness, it should
Speaker 4: like actually have to deal with some of those things.
Speaker 4: And when you don't have right to work, there's less
Speaker 4: incentive for the union to work on those things because
Speaker 4: they don't have to appeal as much to workers because
Speaker 4: workers are forced to support them. So anyway, all that
Speaker 4: is to say, it shouldn't be a cope for for
Speaker 4: unions to just say, well, this is you know, business
Speaker 4: brainwashing and freeloaders. I mean, they're like very legitimate problems
Speaker 4: that have broken the trust of some of the workers.
Speaker 4: And that is at the very least an opening. And
Speaker 4: Republicans have not been smart enough to really capitalize on
Speaker 4: that because they didn't frankly give a damn, Like they
Speaker 4: weren't paying attention and they didn't want to touch the
Speaker 4: labor issue period. And Donald Trump is the only Republican
Speaker 4: candidate right now that's going in on this, and that's
Speaker 4: like shocking. I mean, it's not shocking at all, but
Speaker 4: it's shocking from a purely political strategic standpoint that no
Speaker 4: consultants in the beltwayh have like picked up on this
Speaker 4: and been like, ooh, maybe we should talk to these
Speaker 4: workers because they comprise a group of our base. They
Speaker 4: delivered the election to Donald Trump in twenty sixteen. In
Speaker 4: some part, it's just absurd that the Beltwegh is still
Speaker 4: that dumb and bought and paid for by big business,
Speaker 4: that no candidate wants to touch this.
Speaker 3: And I'll be very curious to see how he frames this.
Speaker 3: I think A five is Trump's, you know, so I
Speaker 3: think this suggests he's Trump says he always had autowork back.
Speaker 3: Union leaders say his first term record shows otherwise, So
Speaker 3: I think he'll probably get up and say that I've
Speaker 3: always had your back. It'll be interesting to see whether
Speaker 3: he like bashes, if he like stands with workers with bashes,
Speaker 3: union leaders and Democrats, or which would be a misread
Speaker 3: of the moment, because I think that UAW members right
Speaker 3: now are very happy with Sean Fain, very happy with
Speaker 3: UAW leadership. They love the way that they're rolling out
Speaker 3: the strikes slowly so that most of the UAW members
Speaker 3: are actually getting paid right now. Like they're causing significant
Speaker 3: pain for the companies, they're bringing these companies to the table,
Speaker 3: extracting concessions negotiations from when I'm told are going extremely well,
Speaker 3: and they're getting paid for most of them because only
Speaker 3: like thirteen thousand are out on strike right now. So
Speaker 3: I think if Trump goes after the leadership, I don't
Speaker 3: think it's gonna actually land because they're like, no, what
Speaker 3: are you talking about? Like these guys. We elected these
Speaker 3: guys just recently and they're doing exactly what we asked
Speaker 3: them to do and they're executing it well.
Speaker 4: Yeah, And I mean I guess again, like I expect
Speaker 4: that he probably will go after leadership because that's one
Speaker 4: of like in recent years and still memory right, yeah,
Speaker 4: and your point right now about like leadership. Recently, a
Speaker 4: lot of Republicans just are not well acquainted with labor issues,
Speaker 4: Like they don't know what's true on the ground, they
Speaker 4: don't have the contacts. They really just like don't have
Speaker 4: their ear to the ground. They definitely don't have their
Speaker 4: finger on the pulse. I know this will come as
Speaker 4: a surprise to everyone of.
Speaker 3: Who is Republicans from Indiana that I was talking to
Speaker 3: Jim Banks, Yeah, Jim Banks. I asked him, like, you know,
Speaker 3: how our people responding, As the Republican chair of the
Speaker 3: Anti Wolke Caucus, how are Republicans responding to the coming strike.
Speaker 3: He's like, nobody in Washington that I know of is
Speaker 3: remotely even paying attention to it.
Speaker 4: Well, and so this gets us to our next element.
Speaker 4: Let's put a SX up on the screen. This is
Speaker 4: Josh Holly, Republican senator elected in twenty eighteen and definitely
Speaker 4: someone considered to be on the quote unquote new right.
Speaker 4: Visiting the picket line in Wentzville, he said, these workers
Speaker 4: deserve better pay, better benefits, and a guarantee their jobs
Speaker 4: will stay in America. Marco Rubio supported the Amazon unionization
Speaker 4: drive down in Bessemer. We have seen some Republicans flirting
Speaker 4: with supporting striking workers, flirting with supporting unions. If we
Speaker 4: put a seven up on the screen, this gets interesting too.
Speaker 4: This is Pat White. He says, shame on Josh Holly
Speaker 4: for acting like a friend to labor just for cheap publicity.
Speaker 4: His record shows a lack of support for the labor
Speaker 4: community up until now. These are some headlines he put
Speaker 4: up on the screen. Holly has been a vocal supporter
Speaker 4: of implementing quote right to work in Missouri. Missouri election
Speaker 4: proposition a right to work vote. So, Ryan, we were
Speaker 4: just basically going over all of this.
Speaker 3: And this one's good, and we're Overtime pay raise blocked
Speaker 3: in Missouri and nationwide as a result of lawsuit brought
Speaker 3: by Missouri Attorney General Josh Holly. That's when Obama tried
Speaker 3: to raise overtime pay for people who were misclassified as
Speaker 3: managers and HAULI suit and I think misclassified as non manager.
Speaker 4: But whatever it was, And I think Josh Holly would say.
Speaker 3: Misclass fied as managers. I had it right the first time.
Speaker 4: Sorry, we should we should actually try to get Josh
Speaker 4: Holly on to talk about this, because I think he
Speaker 4: would say, and you can choose to believe it or not.
Speaker 4: I think he would say, I understand why people are skeptical.
Speaker 4: I think he would say, like, listen, I get it,
Speaker 4: Like the Republican Party has a very different record on
Speaker 4: these issues, you know, I still I'm sure he would say,
Speaker 4: I still support right to work, but I understand people's
Speaker 4: people's skepticism, Like this has been a real problem for
Speaker 4: the Republican Party, but the fact of the matter is
Speaker 4: that it's changing. The Republican base is changing. He wants
Speaker 4: to convert and well that's what I'm saying, Like it's
Speaker 4: one of these like weird things in politics where you know,
Speaker 4: I again, like I understand if if people are questioning
Speaker 4: the sincerity, but the practical effect of it is actually powerful.
Speaker 3: It's good for the workers. The workers had Corey Bush
Speaker 3: and aoc in Missouri at a picket line, and they
Speaker 3: have Josh Holly at a picket line. You can call
Speaker 3: them all cynical. That's great for the workers.
Speaker 4: That's great for the workers at the end of the day,
Speaker 4: for the workers. All right, Should we move on Ryan
Speaker 4: to Trump News yesterday?
Speaker 3: Yes? So Donald Trump getting hammered by a judge for fraud.
Speaker 3: The judge says he doesn't even need to, you know,
Speaker 3: hear evidence anymore, because just he said, just looking at
Speaker 3: the plain paperwork, he can say that a lot of
Speaker 3: fraud was going on. You've had the Trump kids. I
Speaker 3: think we put up b one here. The Trump kids
Speaker 3: kind of freaking out about one particular part of the
Speaker 3: ruling where the judge apparently said that he, you know,
Speaker 3: he guesses that mar A Lago should be worth about
Speaker 3: eighteen million dollars and Trump said it was worth a
Speaker 3: billion plus now, I think and the problem for the
Speaker 3: valuation of mar A Lago is that it has to
Speaker 3: be a club, you know, it has to sell as
Speaker 3: a club. It can't be you know, subdivided up into
Speaker 3: a million different McMansions. My favorite part of all This
Speaker 3: is that the Trump basically suggested, according to the judge,
Speaker 3: that any valuation that he put on a property and
Speaker 3: including mar A Lago is legitimate because he could find
Speaker 3: a buyer from Saudi Arabia who would pay that price,
Speaker 3: which I think is true, but more damning, like he
Speaker 3: should be in the cell with Menendez if like if
Speaker 3: Menenda is getting a bunch of gold bars from Egypt
Speaker 3: for whatever he's assuming in a cell, then Trump just
Speaker 3: having a blank check from the Saudis for whatever he
Speaker 3: wants to give them. I think we just forget how
Speaker 3: how corrupt that is and and how how much it
Speaker 3: undermines our national security and our national interests to have
Speaker 3: somebody who and whose whose son in law, for instance,
Speaker 3: takes two billion dollars within days of leaving the White House.
Speaker 3: If you every day know that you have a a
Speaker 3: blank check that you can just write from the Bank
Speaker 3: of Saudi, that's gonna be in your head when you're
Speaker 3: making foreign policy.
Speaker 4: Absolutely absolutely, And it's one of the I think legitimate
Speaker 4: arguments that was made about Donald Trump and his business
Speaker 4: interests over the course of his presidency. There were all
Speaker 4: kinds of funny ones that were made, but that was
Speaker 4: always a legitimate one. And this is so basically the
Speaker 4: news yesterday is there's this civil suit that it was
Speaker 4: Letitia James actually brought against Donald Trump, and the judge
Speaker 4: ruled in that lawsuit that Trump and the Trump organization
Speaker 4: deceived banks and insurers and other types of people. I'm
Speaker 4: reading from the Associated Press here by quote overvaluing his
Speaker 4: assets and exaggerating his net worth on paperwork used and
Speaker 4: making deals and securing loans. So one example of that
Speaker 4: is mar A Lago, as you mentioned, inflating, according to
Speaker 4: the judge, its value on one financial statement by two
Speaker 4: three hundred percent. He also, the judge quote rebuked Trump
Speaker 4: for lying about the size of his Manhattan apartment. Trump
Speaker 4: claimed his three Worry Trump Tower penthouse was nearly three
Speaker 4: times its actual size, valuing it at three hundred and
Speaker 4: twenty seven million dollars.
Speaker 3: And the judge also pointed out that they would list
Speaker 3: rent controlled apartments as worth just as much as unrent
Speaker 3: controlled apartments. Unrestricted land they would list is just as
Speaker 3: much as restricted land. Here's why you and you know
Speaker 3: me well, so you know I have just no soft
Speaker 3: spot for this crime, this particular crime, because it's what
Speaker 3: Joe Judice and Teresa Judaice went to actual prison for
Speaker 3: these are the real housewives of New Jersey, Real Housewives
Speaker 3: of New Jersey Star They like pencil whipped a little
Speaker 3: bit of a mortgage just to like just so that
Speaker 3: they could float like from one like rehab got rehab
Speaker 3: to another, and the FBI and the rest of the
Speaker 3: irs and everybody else came at them and sent both
Speaker 3: of them to prison and deported Joe. Yeah, not for
Speaker 3: like a point zero zero one of what the Trump
Speaker 3: family did here. So no, no sympathy for me.
Speaker 4: Theresa is on Celebrity Prentice and I think has sort
Speaker 4: of hinted that she's supportive of Donald Trump's of.
Speaker 3: Course she is, Like the demography is destiny right there,
Speaker 3: like that Trump supporters, no doubt about it. But some
Speaker 3: serious penalties coming for Trump, I was just.
Speaker 4: Gonna say, right, So, like the consequences of this is
Speaker 4: that they actually the judge ordered and this is Arthur
Speaker 4: anger On. He ordered that some of Trump's business licenses
Speaker 4: are now rescinded, which makes it very hard, at least
Speaker 4: according to the Associated Press, for them to do business
Speaker 4: in New York, which is where they have always done.
Speaker 3: Business, like they're trying to take the Trump Tower from him,
Speaker 3: from us the people.
Speaker 4: But in all seriousness, I mean, this is again for
Speaker 4: all of the lawfair involved in these attacks on Trump
Speaker 4: and all of what I think are legitimate conversations about
Speaker 4: the weaponization of the Justice Apartment, et cetera, et cetera.
Speaker 4: Trump always had serious vulnerabilities, always had serious vulnerabilities. And
Speaker 4: that's why even when he initially ran for president, I
Speaker 4: don't know to this day that he really wanted to
Speaker 4: because he didn't think that he would make it more
Speaker 4: than like maybe six months. Because anybody with this level
Speaker 4: of sort of business or this type of business history
Speaker 4: really wouldn't want the attention of basically what a truck
Speaker 4: Schumer say about the Intel agencies, like, that's what's going
Speaker 4: to happen, whether it's Intel or whether it's your business.
Speaker 4: You're going to become a massive target for all of
Speaker 4: these things, and you genuinely wouldn't want to expose yourself
Speaker 4: to that level.
Speaker 3: There probably aren't any real estate developers in New York
Speaker 3: who would want that type of scrutiny. Donald Trump is
Speaker 3: definitely not one of them, right, He's not among them. Also,
Speaker 3: he has no lawyers like because for years he has
Speaker 3: refused to pay his attorneys, and I have never seen this.
Speaker 3: In this order, the judge find Trump's attorneys for their
Speaker 3: bad arguments, like the arguments that they made that, according
Speaker 3: to the judge, were so bad and so specious that
Speaker 3: he fined them seven five hundred dollars because he's and
Speaker 3: he says, in order, I told you to stop making
Speaker 3: stupid arguments, you came back with stupid arguments. You're fined
Speaker 3: like I can. It's one thing to lose emotion, it's
Speaker 3: another thing to lose emotions so badly that the judge
Speaker 3: charges you. It's like, that's pretty It's like that line
Speaker 3: where we are all stupider for having read this motion
Speaker 3: and as as a result, you owe us seven five
Speaker 3: hundred dollars.
Speaker 4: And that's where I think we should go back to,
Speaker 4: like again this idea that Donald Trump, so he camt
Speaker 4: paigned again saying I know the system and I alone
Speaker 4: can fix it. Basically, he was saying that I have
Speaker 4: brazenly participated in the upper echelons of America's business and
Speaker 4: political elite for decades. I have gamed this smart. I'm
Speaker 4: famous for it. Yeah, it doesn't make me, like, it
Speaker 4: doesn't make me criminal, it makes me smart something to
Speaker 4: that extent. It's been out in the open with Donald
Speaker 4: Trump for a long time. He hasn't sort of hid
Speaker 4: that he's at best gamed the system. And so I
Speaker 4: don't think this affects him with voters. I think again,
Speaker 4: like people actually know this stuff about Donald Trump, Like
Speaker 4: it's totally baked into the Trump cake, as we talked
Speaker 4: about a lot. So the question of whether or not
Speaker 4: this is like a big blow to Trump politically, I
Speaker 4: think it's it's not a big blow to Trump politically
Speaker 4: at all. But at the same.
Speaker 3: Time, book wise, ouch, this is like this is a.
Speaker 4: Very real hard consequence for him on that level for sure.
Speaker 3: Right because he didn't have the types of lawyers and
Speaker 3: accountants who would say, you know what, that's not the
Speaker 3: square foot it's on the square food size of this apartment.
Speaker 3: And you can't say this is worth three hundred and
Speaker 3: fifty million dollars. Anybody looks, they'll know it's not, and
Speaker 3: that's illegal. You're gonna get in trouble. And if anybody
Speaker 3: would say that to him, he would not pay them,
Speaker 3: be fire them.
Speaker 4: And why does this not bother Trump voters. And this
Speaker 4: is maybe the most important question. It's because on the
Speaker 4: one hand, Donald Trump was in some sense willing to
Speaker 4: say things like, it doesn't make me criminal, it makes
Speaker 4: me smart. And that's I don't know what I'm paraphrasing him,
Speaker 4: but he did say it makes me smart in relationship
Speaker 4: to I think it was taxes.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 4: So like, on the one hand, again, people know this,
Speaker 4: they expect it, but they also see that see him
Speaker 4: as somebody who has kind of turned his fire on
Speaker 4: the others, the Clintons, the Bidens, who are doing the
Speaker 4: same thing. And so people are genuinely upset about corruption,
Speaker 4: petty corruption like this in addition to like really serious
Speaker 4: major corruption, Saudi corruption. We're going to talk about potential
Speaker 4: Iran corruption. These sorts of things like genuinely do really
Speaker 4: bother Trump voters, but they see it as something that's
Speaker 4: Ronald Trump has sort of set his sights on. Now.
Speaker 4: I think your reporting on Jared Kushner should give people
Speaker 4: serious pause Trump supporter serious pause as to whether that's true,
Speaker 4: as to whether he's sincere when he says he's set
Speaker 4: his sights on actually undercutting the power of American elites
Speaker 4: on every level, that Trump voters are bothered by one
Speaker 4: hundred percent, So that's a different conversation. But again, like
Speaker 4: people have a very real reason for seeing Trump in
Speaker 4: that sense. They believe that, like he's somebody he profited
Speaker 4: and benefited from this system and then decided to basically
Speaker 4: destroy it. The question is whether he actually wants to
Speaker 4: undermine and destroy it.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and then right, but then then once you're behind him,
Speaker 3: it becomes a team sport, it becomes negative polarization. And
Speaker 3: if you think, you know, Biden is like a pedophile
Speaker 3: communist who's trying to sell the country to the Chinese,
Speaker 3: and then you really don't care, right, what what your opponent?
Speaker 3: I mean, what what Trump? What's wrong with Trump? Because
Speaker 3: like that that's your that you're going to ride.
Speaker 4: And that's another thing to the point earlier I know,
Speaker 4: we have to move on that you made about how
Speaker 4: I don't think any real estate developer in New York
Speaker 4: would want to invite this kind of scrutiny. That's another
Speaker 4: thing that's going to really irritate people here, and I
Speaker 4: think rightfully so, Uh, that's not to say Trump didn't
Speaker 4: do anything wrong, because I think he was obviously doing
Speaker 4: something wrong, but it then feels like like witch hunt
Speaker 4: stuff once again, that Donald Trump is being singled out.
Speaker 4: Nobody else is going to be singled out, even real
Speaker 4: estate developers or similar business people who have given a
Speaker 4: bunch of money to Democrats. Just going after Trump because
Speaker 4: he's Trump, because it's the They're not after me, they're
Speaker 4: after you. Meme that he posted when he was president,
Speaker 4: and that is there's truth to it, and it resonates
Speaker 4: because of that. So that will, I mean, I think
Speaker 4: that'll loom large in the minds of people who when
Speaker 4: we're talking about you know, if you ask Hione why,
Speaker 4: like do you care about the money that goes to
Speaker 4: Jared Kushner and his relationship with MBS, et cetera, et cetera,
Speaker 4: people will say, listen, this is it's more serious than
Speaker 4: that would be the response. Now, I think both of
Speaker 4: us would would disagree, but I get why when you
Speaker 4: look at some of this stuff, at least on paper,
Speaker 4: it does seem like just a slap in the face
Speaker 4: of the Trump voters. In addition to Donald Trump, right.
Speaker 3: But he didn't have to deport Joe Judice. He didn't
Speaker 3: have to deport joju and Judice was deported under Trump
Speaker 3: that's right. Deporter in Chief's actually that was Obama. He
Speaker 3: could have pardoned confusing your deporters and jee, but he
Speaker 3: did deport Joe.
Speaker 4: That's right.
Speaker 3: He had a chance to pardon him, didn't.
Speaker 9: Well.
Speaker 4: Shout out to Joe Judice, who I believe is in.
Speaker 3: The Obamas's That's that's right. So wild story in Samophore
Speaker 3: about Iran. You want to set this one up because.
Speaker 4: Uh yeah, so this story made really big waves when
Speaker 4: it published in Samaphore yesterday. And actually I saw the
Speaker 4: Free Press, which was very Wise's publication, republished it just today.
Speaker 4: We can go ahead and put c one up on
Speaker 4: the screen. This is a little bit from the Semaphore story,
Speaker 4: and I'm going to read from it here, except my
Speaker 4: notes got mixed up and I don't have it in
Speaker 4: front of me. Ryan, Do you have it in front
Speaker 4: of you?
Speaker 3: I don't. But while you look for it, I'll make
Speaker 3: the point that it's very nice to see Barry Wise
Speaker 3: show some interest in a foreign government trying to influence Washington.
Speaker 3: If she's really wants to get on that beat, I
Speaker 3: can point to a number of other countries that that
Speaker 3: are kind of in that broad region that she might
Speaker 3: want to look at because it's kind of there's kind
Speaker 3: of a lot going on there.
Speaker 4: Well, here's the right, of course, is alluding to Israel.
Speaker 4: The Semaphore story starts by saying, in the spring of
Speaker 4: twenty fourteen, because the story talks both about the Obama
Speaker 4: administration and the current Biden administration, the Special Envoy to Irun,
Speaker 4: Robert O'Malley or Robert malllee, is brought into this story
Speaker 4: in some ways that are probably expected. Obviously he came
Speaker 4: under investigation. I think it's an ongoing investigation into Rob
Speaker 4: mallie's handling of classified documents.
Speaker 3: Which Iran envoy and like the lead Iran nuclear deal guy.
Speaker 4: Yes, right, And so the story says. In the spring
Speaker 4: of twenty fourteen, senior Iranian foreign ministry officials initiated a
Speaker 4: quiet effort to bolster Tehran's imagion positions on global security issues,
Speaker 4: particularly its nuclear program, by building ties with a network
Speaker 4: of influential overseas academics and researchers. They called it the
Speaker 4: Iran Experts Initiative. The scope and scale of the IEI
Speaker 4: project has emerged in a large cache of Iranian government
Speaker 4: correspondence and emails reported for the first time by Semaphore
Speaker 4: and Iran International. The officials working under the moderate President
Speaker 4: Hassan Rahani congratulated themselves on the impact of the initiative.
Speaker 4: At least three of the people and this is the
Speaker 4: big kind of bombshell, as it was perceived yesterday, at
Speaker 4: least three of the people on the foreign ministries list
Speaker 4: were or became top aids to Robert Malley, the Biden
Speaker 4: administration Special envoy on Iran, who was placed on leave
Speaker 4: this June following the suspension of his security clearance, and
Speaker 4: so Ryan. I think the IEE this is a statement
Speaker 4: that's in the story. They talk about how this is.
Speaker 4: They're spinning it as kind of a mundane outreach effort
Speaker 4: to second generation Iranians in different parts of the world.
Speaker 4: I think one of the big questions here is the funding,
Speaker 4: because it seems nebulously attributed to a European government. I
Speaker 4: think is what comes up over and over again in
Speaker 4: the story, but nobody says who that European government is.
Speaker 4: We don't quite know what people were getting paid for.
Speaker 4: There was a lot of arranging of op eds, seemingly
Speaker 4: people working for our government checking in with people working
Speaker 4: in the Iranian government. About decisions on whether to speak
Speaker 4: in certain panels like Israel came into the picture on
Speaker 4: one of those questions, So you know, what, do you
Speaker 4: see this. Let's actually just put the next element up
Speaker 4: on the screen for a response from We're going to
Speaker 4: take or Tegas, who was a spokesperson for Mike Pompeo
Speaker 4: when he was a Secretary of State. She said, it's
Speaker 4: not very often that my jaw drops open while reading
Speaker 4: an article, as it did with the semaphore piece. There's
Speaker 4: no two ways around this. Top Obama and Biden officials
Speaker 4: were a part of a foreign influence operation by the
Speaker 4: Iranian regime, some of who are still in government holding
Speaker 4: security clearances. This comes on top of the news that
Speaker 4: Rob Mallee, Biden's Iran envoy, had to leave his position
Speaker 4: over his security clearance being revoked. Bombshell, Ryan or not,
Speaker 4: I did.
Speaker 3: Not think so. And there's like a lot of smoke
Speaker 3: in that in that post by Morgan or Tagus there
Speaker 3: one is the is the kind of conflation of this
Speaker 3: comes on the top of the news like that's that's
Speaker 3: a way that people like to link things together that
Speaker 3: aren't aren't linked. My understanding is that this security clearance
Speaker 3: was a this was a fight that he was having
Speaker 3: with basically the deep state. Like, so people who were
Speaker 3: like cheering on Rob Malley getting his security clearance stripped,
Speaker 3: if they, you know, they should should think a little
Speaker 3: bit more carefully before they because he was pushing harder.
Speaker 3: Then a lot of people kind of in the intelligence
Speaker 3: community wanted on the on the Iran nuclear deal, and
Speaker 3: this was kind of some payback. But we'll say, like
Speaker 3: the seven four reports that there might be an FBI
Speaker 3: investigation that's ongoing. Like, but again, just because you don't
Speaker 3: like Rob Malley doesn't necessarily mean the FBI is right
Speaker 3: on all these these questions. So the broader point here
Speaker 3: she says they were a part of a quote, they
Speaker 3: were part of a foreign influence operation by the Iranian regime.
Speaker 3: It does seem very clear that the Iranian regime, you know,
Speaker 3: tried to set up an influence.
Speaker 4: Operation absolutely and successfully did.
Speaker 3: Where they were you know, they created a platform where
Speaker 3: people would they would hold conferences. People would go to
Speaker 3: the conferences, would speak on panels, would talk to other experts,
Speaker 3: and then you would hope to like influence them and
Speaker 3: from there they would go to se and eight they're
Speaker 3: talking points either on if they get them on cable,
Speaker 3: they're very lucky. If they can get them into print,
Speaker 3: Uh then that then that that's decent too. Uh what
Speaker 3: what what kind of made jumped out of me about
Speaker 3: this story is how also mundane? It seems a old
Speaker 3: like the current Iranian regime. Uh, it doesn't like Malley,
Speaker 3: like it's like hostile to them. It's like it's comp
Speaker 3: like so whatever whatever whatever claims might be made certainly
Speaker 3: aren't true anymore. There's also like every country does this,
Speaker 3: Like there's not like Iran is under sanctions and so
Speaker 3: is limited in what it can do when it lobbies.
Speaker 3: I mean, it's barred basically from lobbying. But Washington is
Speaker 3: just fueled by foreign money and so to watch and
Speaker 3: so to see this be something that is read as
Speaker 3: jaw dropping. While the Egyptian government is bribing the chair
Speaker 3: of Senate Far related committee, like that's an influence operation. Yeah,
Speaker 3: that's like, but that's a dictator who's on our side,
Speaker 3: So you're not going to see outrage. And I was
Speaker 3: kind of jokingly referring to Israel when it's talking about
Speaker 3: Barry Wise, but not just Israel, Saudi Arabia, the Nine
Speaker 3: Arab Emirates, the Cotteries, Turkey, like all of these countries
Speaker 3: run these massive influence operations Ukraine, Ukraine, Ukraine, Ukraine with Podesta.
Speaker 4: Podesta, Yeah, the European Center for a Modern Ukraine. Google
Speaker 4: the European Center for a Modern Ukraine. It's very similar
Speaker 4: to this. Actually, it's basically a front group that's created
Speaker 4: by a foreign government to do this very innocuous looking
Speaker 4: influence operation. You can say this was I would like
Speaker 4: a meeting with Menandez's office on behalf of the European
Speaker 4: Center for a Modern Ukraine, which sounds different than saying
Speaker 4: on behalf of Yanikovic. It's much easier to say, I
Speaker 4: would like And that's.
Speaker 3: Just like they was set up this IEI thing what
Speaker 3: it was called, yeah, exactly, and so they and you
Speaker 3: get a European government to co fund it, so that
Speaker 3: that gets you around the sanctions problem.
Speaker 4: Right And guess probably for the European Center from Modern
Speaker 4: Ukraine is a good example of how this works because
Speaker 4: the way that was set up, it was a shell
Speaker 4: nonprofit based in Europe, and that way they tried to
Speaker 4: get around registering as foreign agents, and that's going to
Speaker 4: be a problem for the people that are implicated in this.
Speaker 4: And like you said, Ryan, Washington is run by foreign money.
Speaker 4: If they were actually getting money, if they were doing things,
Speaker 4: that's yeah, that is that is a really that will
Speaker 4: be a huge problem for them. And I'm going to
Speaker 4: read this. I alluded to this earlier, but arian tibought
Speaker 4: to buy the current Pentagon official so she works for
Speaker 4: the Pentagon right now, and at last at least two
Speaker 4: occasions checked in with Iron's Foreign ministry before attending policy events.
Speaker 4: According to the emails, she wrote to the Zarani and
Speaker 4: Farcia on June twenty seven, twenty fourteen, to say she'd
Speaker 4: met with Saudi Prince Turkey el alf I saw a
Speaker 4: former ambassador to the US, who expressed interest in working
Speaker 4: together and invited her to Saudi Arabia. She also said
Speaker 4: she'd been invited to attend a workshop on Iron's nuclear
Speaker 4: program at benger And University in Israel. I'm not interested
Speaker 4: in going, but then I thought maybe it would be
Speaker 4: better that I go and talk rather than in ISRAELI
Speaker 4: like Emily Landau, who goes and disseminates this information, I
Speaker 4: would like to ask your opinion too, and see if
Speaker 4: you think I should accept the invitation and go, so
Speaker 4: Rani replied the same day. All things considered, it seems
Speaker 4: Saudi Arabia is a good case, but the second case,
Speaker 4: Israel is better to be avoided. Thanks, and she responds,
Speaker 4: thank you for your advice. I will take action regarding
Speaker 4: Saudi Arabia and will keep you updated on the progress.
Speaker 4: There's no evidence to Badibaye went to the conference in Israel. There,
Speaker 4: her books and research reports suggest she's interviewed a number
Speaker 4: of senior Israeli officials. So ran I think you're right.
Speaker 4: This does absolutely resemble just about I don't know, like
Speaker 4: many influence operations in size and and scope. The difference,
Speaker 4: of course between Hungary or Ukraine is that this is
Speaker 4: an adversarial nuclear power, I think, and that's you know,
Speaker 4: that is genuinely different. And I mean, obviously I'm sure
Speaker 4: you could find similar cases with Israel, Definitely with Cutter,
Speaker 4: Definitely with other countries like that Egypt, although that seems
Speaker 4: to be a much more theatrically comedic, almost like Greek
Speaker 4: comedy type influence operation that's not directly connected to some
Speaker 4: like formal apparatus, right, Like they just went right to
Speaker 4: Menendez and saying we're doing this respectable form of influence pedaling,
Speaker 4: which is to create a shell group.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and the understanding in Washington since CC took power
Speaker 3: is that Yusuf allow Taba, who is the UAE's ambassador,
Speaker 3: has been operating also as the kind of ambassador from Egypt.
Speaker 3: Like this very bizarre situation because the UA funded what
Speaker 3: was it called, I forget the Arab Arabic word, but
Speaker 3: for that mess protest against Morsey and the Muslim Brotherhood
Speaker 3: government that led to the military coup. UE funded that,
Speaker 3: and afterwards the UAE basically became kind of the lobbying
Speaker 3: vehicle for the Egyptians in in Washington and would lobby
Speaker 3: for its ability to get weapons and aid and said
Speaker 3: it did all this diplomacy, And so I think this
Speaker 3: is probably some weird like freelancing because they don't have
Speaker 3: any diplomatic muscles because the UA flexes them all. And
Speaker 3: so you've got these freelancers Coen brother types on the
Speaker 3: side giving gold bars to Menendez.
Speaker 4: Well you added another element to this, Oh, yes, different,
Speaker 4: it's a different layer. Ryan tell us about the reporter
Speaker 4: who broke this story, j Solomon, who has a little
Speaker 4: bit of a history with around himself.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so put up this next element. This is New
Speaker 3: York Times a couple of years ago reporting Wall Street
Speaker 3: Journal fire's reporter with ties to Iranian born magnate. That
Speaker 3: is about Jay Solomon, who had always been known as
Speaker 3: if a bit hawkish, but a well sourced reporter for
Speaker 3: the Wall Street Journal. All of a sudden he was fired,
Speaker 3: and that came just ahead of an Associated Press investigation
Speaker 3: into him, uncovering the fact that he was in talks
Speaker 3: with this Iranian born magnate to launch a bunch of
Speaker 3: different business deals. So this is the reporter who was
Speaker 3: then hired by Semaphore in order to cover the Middle
Speaker 3: East and is now writing about this influence operation. You know,
Speaker 3: he himself was fired for getting into a financial arrangement
Speaker 3: with his like leading source who was and this was
Speaker 3: UAE related like. So to go back to what we
Speaker 3: were saying about the Amoradis, he was an Iranian born magnate,
Speaker 3: but he was someone who worked very closely with the
Speaker 3: m or So the Amidis had something of an influence
Speaker 3: operation going on. This Wall Street Journal reporter who then
Speaker 3: got fired and then later got hired later by Samophorre
Speaker 3: to write about an Iranian influence operation. So that's why
Speaker 3: you have to kind of forgive me for being like
Speaker 3: really like this, this is a bombshell.
Speaker 4: It is to the extent I mean, I think it's
Speaker 4: a very serious story, to the extent that there are
Speaker 4: people in the Biden administration right now that seem to
Speaker 4: have cozy or well maybe warmer ties with the Iranians
Speaker 4: than they should given the state of the country, the
Speaker 4: state of Iran. So I think, you know, the current
Speaker 4: ties are genuinely problematic. Twenty fourteen was a somewhat different
Speaker 4: time period, and obviously we could have a different conversation
Speaker 4: about the nuclear deal. I think to the extent that
Speaker 4: it reflects on current Biden administration officials, that's problematic. But
Speaker 4: I totally take your point. It's a little.
Speaker 3: Bit a little rich, little rich.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah. He recently he sued over getting hacked and having
Speaker 3: his emails exposed, which then exposed this corruption scandal, and
Speaker 3: the case was just I think last week or so,
Speaker 3: it was just it was dismissed. That can't go forward.
Speaker 4: And as to the veracity of this trove of documents,
Speaker 4: some of the reported that they scraped metadata, They did
Speaker 4: an analysis and there's no evidence of it having been changed.
Speaker 4: People can take that for what they will, but certainly
Speaker 4: a story that the kind of over on.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's kind of if this is all they got
Speaker 3: so far, it probably wasn't changed. Like, it's pretty mundane stuff.
Speaker 4: Obviously, with Ukraine, the Forefront, Iran, China, all of those
Speaker 4: kind of powers now increasingly seeming to communicate with each
Speaker 4: other and agree with each other on different questions is
Speaker 4: a huge issue for the Biden administration. So this definitely
Speaker 4: isn't going anywhere, and we will continue to follow it
Speaker 4: for sure.
Speaker 3: Now the actual global espionage scandal is the one we're
Speaker 3: going to talk about next, and this is the latest wrinkle.
Speaker 3: A JP Morgan decides that it is going to settle
Speaker 3: with the Virgin Islands over its relationship with with Jeffrey Epstein.
Speaker 3: Just scandalous beginning to end. Do we have, Yeah, we
Speaker 3: have JP Morgan getting asked about this most unfortunate connection
Speaker 3: that they had to Jeffrey Epstein. Let's play diamond here.
Speaker 4: How are you feeling about the Epstein deposition this month?
Speaker 10: I am so sad that we had any relations with
Speaker 10: that man whatsoever. You know, we had top lawyers of
Speaker 10: valueing this from this SEC enforcement, the DOJ, you know,
Speaker 10: and obviously have we known then we know today, we
Speaker 10: would have done things differently. But it's very unfortunate. And
Speaker 10: I have deep respect for these women. That doesn't mean
Speaker 10: reliable for the action of an individual, but I do
Speaker 10: have deep respect for them. My heart goes out to them.
Speaker 10: And he's so tan Brian.
Speaker 4: That's from about four months ago. So they were asking
Speaker 4: about the deposition that month of Jamie Diamond and other executives.
Speaker 3: At jeff Reson original.
Speaker 4: One thing he said, yeah, so one thing he said
Speaker 4: right there that was interesting. He said, obviously, if we
Speaker 4: had known then what we know today, we wouldn't have
Speaker 4: had this business arrangement with Jeffrey Epstein. But of course
Speaker 4: that's part of the problem here is that JP Morgan
Speaker 4: did have indications they did know. And this is one
Speaker 4: of the biggest remaining questions, and it's not even a
Speaker 4: question in many cases why people Bill Gates included continued
Speaker 4: to have relationships with business personal Jeffrey Epstein after he
Speaker 4: got that sweetheart plea deal down in Florida that at
Speaker 4: the very least exposed him as a predator that's the problem,
Speaker 4: and that's not nobody. Nobody has a good answer to
Speaker 4: that question, not Bill Gates, not JP Morgan, Which is
Speaker 4: where you get this seventy five millillion dollar settlement. And
Speaker 4: actually it's worth noting that's the same amount that Deutsche
Speaker 4: Bank agreed to pay Epstein victims. I'm actually reading from
Speaker 4: CNBC here to settle a third Manhattan federal court lawsuit
Speaker 4: that alleged the bank facilitated his sex trafficking when he
Speaker 4: was a customer from twenty thirteen through twenty eighteen. So
Speaker 4: look at those years. Pretty important. Now. The CNBC report
Speaker 4: also notes the deals come months after a separate two
Speaker 4: hundred and ninety dollars million dollar settlement by JP Morgan
Speaker 4: with victims of the now dead predators the Virgin Islands.
Speaker 4: Previous predator the Virgin Islands previously obtained a one hundred
Speaker 4: and five million dollar settlement for Epstein's estate and another
Speaker 4: sixty two million dollars from billionaire investor Leon Black to
Speaker 4: resolve potential claims related to Epstein. Now, this money from
Speaker 4: JP Morgan is going to attorney's fees for the Virgin
Speaker 4: Island and Virgin Islands, and what they described infrastructure to
Speaker 4: help them with sex trafficking and victims and all of that.
Speaker 4: Man For JP Morgan, seventy five million dollars not a
Speaker 4: huge amount. For Deutsche Bank seventy five million dollars, not
Speaker 4: a huge amount, especially when they're doing okay right now.
Speaker 4: But when you add that to the two hundred and
Speaker 4: ninety million dollars that they had to give to the victims,
Speaker 4: that's that's stacked up. That's a costly error. Obviously, they
Speaker 4: probably still the money, of course that was alluding to it.
Speaker 3: Right, but they probably still made money off of it
Speaker 3: in the end. Absolutely, And there are some the incentives
Speaker 3: here are for these you know, banks who work with
Speaker 3: these massively rich people to just look the other way.
Speaker 3: And it's so arcane and opaque that it's this constant
Speaker 3: cat and mouse game between the regulators and the banks.
Speaker 3: And the cats are tiny, the mice are huge. It's
Speaker 3: just they're just hunting the dark. It says, you know,
Speaker 3: JP Morriy did not admit any wrongdoing in the settlement,
Speaker 3: which will give fifty five million dollars to Virginia Island's
Speaker 3: charities and the American Territories anti tree efforts. So as
Speaker 3: the Virginia Islands said the deal quote includes several substantial
Speaker 3: commitments by JP Morgan Chase to identify, report, and cut
Speaker 3: off support for potential human trafficking, including establishing and implementing
Speaker 3: comprehensive policies and procedures unquote. That's the good that's the
Speaker 3: hard part. And also they don't want to do it
Speaker 3: right like it, so, yeah, they just have to constantly
Speaker 3: be exposed and pressured. Otherwise their incentive is to just
Speaker 3: allow their clients to just move money, you know, in
Speaker 3: whatever way they feel like they can get away with.
Speaker 4: Yes, and yeah, it becomes the tax of doing business.
Speaker 4: It's like a fee, right, Like you're going to have
Speaker 4: to pay some settlement down the road if it turns
Speaker 4: out that this guy you have really good indications might
Speaker 4: be a sex trafficker, is sex trafficking and you're facilitating it.
Speaker 4: I think it's actually the case itself is actually a
Speaker 4: pretty interesting test of liability and the law regarding liability
Speaker 4: and bank liability. But it's very very clear that the
Speaker 4: relationship top executives that JP Morgan had with Jeffrey Epstein
Speaker 4: was wildly inappropriate. The legality of it is obviously a
Speaker 4: different question. But they are one of many organizations and
Speaker 4: people who continue to do business with him and continue
Speaker 4: to have personal business with him beyond when it was appropriate, including,
Speaker 4: by the way, the Virgin Islands, which is another interesting
Speaker 4: layer in the story. Lee Fong has done excellent reporting
Speaker 4: on this. This is a headline from Lee in August
Speaker 4: fired ag leading Epstein inquiry reveals the Virgin Islands governor
Speaker 4: pressured her on pedophile's behalf. A subheading. His newly followed
Speaker 4: court documents show that the Virgin Islands Attorney General investigating
Speaker 4: Epstein faced political pressure to give the pedophile a special waiver.
Speaker 4: He needed a special waiver in the Virgin Islands, and
Speaker 4: he got it, and it looks as though he was
Speaker 4: I mean, he was lavishing people in the Virgin Islands
Speaker 4: with donations and political donations, all kinds of stuff in
Speaker 4: order to get the treatment that he needed to be
Speaker 4: doing business down there. And so it's not just JP
Speaker 4: Morgan that was complicit. And so the settlement with the
Speaker 4: Virgin Islands is interesting because there's more and more reporting
Speaker 4: coming out that a lot of people in the Virgin
Speaker 4: Islands seem to be compromised beyond ethical relation, beyond sort
Speaker 4: of normal ethics with Jeffrey Epstein.
Speaker 3: Yeah, good point, Like, it's definitely not only JP Morgan.
Speaker 3: And if you're even going to sympathize with JP Morgan
Speaker 3: for a second, you're going to say, from JP Morgan's perspective,
Speaker 3: going to say, wait a minute, this guy's hanging out
Speaker 3: with foreign presidents, foreign prime ministers, members of the royal family.
Speaker 3: Everybody's talking about how he's like an intelligence asset for
Speaker 3: maybe multiple countries. Of course we're doing business with him,
Speaker 3: and now all of a sudden, we're not supposed to
Speaker 3: do business with friends of presidents who are intelligence assets.
Speaker 3: Were JP Morgan Chase, It's it's your fault for letting
Speaker 3: all of this unravel, right.
Speaker 4: And I mean, I think that's another thing is these
Speaker 4: settlements are preventing some exposure probably of why people felt
Speaker 4: pressured or beyond money, Because places like JP Morgan have
Speaker 4: plenty of money, their reason for doing business with Jeffrey
Speaker 4: Epstein might be different than Virgin Islands. People in the
Speaker 4: Virgin Islands government officials sort of petty bureaucrats reasons to
Speaker 4: do business with Jeffrey Epstein and the intelligence ties are
Speaker 4: probably the biggest missing puzzle piece, and you know, it's
Speaker 4: not entirely missing. We have some good reporting that Jeffrey
Speaker 4: Epstein was Massad, was affiliated with Massad, so there's plenty.
Speaker 4: There's plenty to that, and I think there's probably some explanation,
Speaker 4: partially an explanation for why we saw so many powerful
Speaker 4: people continue to have relationships with him when they did.
Speaker 4: But this is, you know, again, the cost of doing
Speaker 4: business if you're JP Morgan, might just be a fat
Speaker 4: legal settlement down the road. And to your point, Ryan,
Speaker 4: I'd love to know if they still came out on top,
Speaker 4: because I think there's a good chance, when Epstein was
Speaker 4: moving as much money as he was, that they did.
Speaker 4: All Right, Well, there's big news yesterday from the FTC
Speaker 4: and Amazon. Things are getting heated. Ryan, tell us what happened.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so dark Brandon rises again. So not only was
Speaker 3: he on the picket line, his his neon eyes were
Speaker 3: blasting Amazon from the FTC and put up this one
Speaker 3: right here. So Lena Khan joined with seventeen attorneys general
Speaker 3: from around the country to file a landmark suit against Amazon.
Speaker 3: Matt Stoller will be here later this week to kind
Speaker 3: of unpack precisely what's going on. Here where what we
Speaker 3: can expect.
Speaker 4: Whether you want it or not, He's going to explain
Speaker 4: it to you.
Speaker 3: He's going to explain it to you. You're going to
Speaker 3: love it.
Speaker 4: He's going to man explain it to you.
Speaker 3: But basically, what they're accusing him of is abusing their
Speaker 3: marketplace power. There are there's a number of details that
Speaker 3: they get into around the way that they say, you
Speaker 3: you know, so you're on Amazon, You've got that like
Speaker 3: little you know, buy now add to kard thing underneath
Speaker 3: the product. What Amazon would do is they would kind
Speaker 3: of crawl the rest of the Internet and find if
Speaker 3: you're a third party seller and you're selling on Amazon
Speaker 3: for eighteen ninety nine, but you're selling on some other
Speaker 3: site for seventeen ninety nine. Let's say your own site
Speaker 3: is you want to bring people there, you want to
Speaker 3: keep the data, you want to build a business. They
Speaker 3: would see that and boom, they take that buy button
Speaker 3: away and that just annihilates your sales. And so what
Speaker 3: that did is it sent a signal to all of
Speaker 3: these third party sellers that Amazon gets to set the price,
Speaker 3: like whatever your Amazon price is, if you go a
Speaker 3: penny below that anywhere else, they're going to nuke your business.
Speaker 3: And that's just one example of the way that they
Speaker 3: do that, but there are a ton of others where
Speaker 3: you know, they will see which products of theirs are
Speaker 3: selling us are selling well, which third party products, and
Speaker 3: then they'll quickly kind of make a crappy generic version
Speaker 3: of it, or even if it is there already is
Speaker 3: a generic version, and then and then they'll undersell the
Speaker 3: third party seller. There are rules around, you know, in
Speaker 3: grocery stores, for instance, that a grocery store, let's say
Speaker 3: it's Acme and they've got Acme cereal, they cannot kind
Speaker 3: of privilege their own their own product on the shelves
Speaker 3: against competitors' products. Like the ideas like the store is
Speaker 3: a platform. You're welcome to sell your own products in
Speaker 3: that store, but you can't take your competitor's stuff and
Speaker 3: put it at the back of the shelf. Because that's
Speaker 3: just as a society rules that we have put into
Speaker 3: place because we want fair competition. What this is trying
Speaker 3: to do is apply that to Amazon's marketplace.
Speaker 4: Yeah yeah, well, and Amazon's argument is one that a
Speaker 4: lot of like anti antitrust people will It's like the
Speaker 4: very familiar one that basically Amazon is being published punished
Speaker 4: for being too successful and for being too efficient, right,
Speaker 4: that this is something consumers want and it benefits consumers.
Speaker 4: And again like this is such a it's they make
Speaker 4: that it's intentionally helpful for them, because it's one of
Speaker 4: those things that makes it almost impossible to disprove because
Speaker 4: we don't have the experiment of what would happen if
Speaker 4: Amazon wasn't engaging in these types of practices. That's the
Speaker 4: entire point is that they are blocking competition and if
Speaker 4: we could see competition, like it's actually not a fair
Speaker 4: playing field because we can't see how they're interaction with
Speaker 4: interacting with competition, which is, by the way, what's at
Speaker 4: stake in the Google anti trust suit as well, in
Speaker 4: that Google has been intentionally blocking fair access to competitive
Speaker 4: playing competitive right.
Speaker 3: Yeah, right, it's three weeks into the Google Search trial
Speaker 3: right now, and I think that's a place where people
Speaker 3: can just understand, go to Google Search, it's like it's
Speaker 3: worse than it was before, and that you know that
Speaker 3: it's not the trajectory that we want. We want things
Speaker 3: to be better over time, not worse. It's kind of
Speaker 3: amazing to think that con was a Yale law student
Speaker 3: six years ago when she published her kind of landmark
Speaker 3: Yelle Law Review piece about Amazon called the Amazon Paradox
Speaker 3: or something like that, about how the current interpretation of
Speaker 3: anti trust laws was making it so that what Amazon
Speaker 3: was doing was considered to be by anti trust regulators
Speaker 3: to be okay, yet they were monopolizing everything, which is
Speaker 3: a clear paradox, like you don't have anti trust laws
Speaker 3: if what Amazon does is considered to be within those laws.
Speaker 3: Right and now here she is as the head of
Speaker 3: the FTC suing Amazon six years later, and this is
Speaker 3: kind of an amazing run.
Speaker 4: It is amazing. And by the way, she has support
Speaker 4: from people like Josh Holly, who we talked about earlier
Speaker 4: in the show, where people are skeptical of whether Josh
Speaker 4: Holly is just doing it for show when he's going
Speaker 4: and supporting union members, and we talked earlier about how
Speaker 4: even if he is doing it for show, the substance
Speaker 4: actually is there and it might not trans into more
Speaker 4: substance down the line, but whether he wants it to
Speaker 4: or not, it's helpful to the workers. It is helpful
Speaker 4: to have people like Josh Hally supporting and in some
Speaker 4: cases other Republican senators supporting these anti trust investigations and suits.
Speaker 3: Because he's been a huge supporter of hers. Yeah.
Speaker 4: Absolutely, And again this is somebody who comes out of
Speaker 4: Warren World. Lena Kahan Elizabeth Warren is partially why she
Speaker 4: ran for president of twenty twenty. She became enemy number
Speaker 4: one of basically the conservative movement and the business community,
Speaker 4: which were way more hand in glove than they used
Speaker 4: to be. If you went to Seapac, you know, just
Speaker 4: ten years ago, it was all these events were sponsored
Speaker 4: by Google and Facebook, and they were, you know, the
Speaker 4: best parties there, to the extent that that's an honor.
Speaker 4: They were like lavishing some of these pro business groups,
Speaker 4: and you know, that was just a that was it
Speaker 4: wasn't so much that they bought support as at the time.
Speaker 4: That's sort of sincere pro business, anti government or limited
Speaker 4: government concerntive ideology was hand in glove with them on
Speaker 4: these business issues, not necessarily the cultural issues, as Republicans
Speaker 4: came to find out down the road. But it is
Speaker 4: kind of remarkable to see Lena Khan in the position
Speaker 4: that she's in coming from Warren World, coming from and
Speaker 4: you see this crop up like Ted Cruz has attacked
Speaker 4: Lena Khan for being you know, basically even Republicans that
Speaker 4: support are on certain things don't agree with everything she does,
Speaker 4: which by the way, is fine. But she gets attacked
Speaker 4: as like a radical, like a Bernie radical, and which
Speaker 4: is interesting because there are some Republicans who would say, yeah,
Speaker 4: we need radical Bernieism in the anti trust space because
Speaker 4: these tech companies are it's very similar to what we
Speaker 4: saw with like rail hundreds of years ago, which is
Speaker 4: that it's a new technology and we don't have the
Speaker 4: sort of infrastructure, muscle memory, and legal precedent about these technologies.
Speaker 4: So when Amazon can put these buy buttons add to
Speaker 4: cart buttons next to other people's products, like, that's just
Speaker 4: an interesting new dilemma that we don't have precedence or
Speaker 4: we don't have exact apples to apples.
Speaker 3: For And it's not a coincidence that she flows out
Speaker 3: of Warren world rather than Bernie world, because Warren, you know,
Speaker 3: is a former Republican who talks about how she loves markets,
Speaker 3: and it's it's the way, it's a way to blend
Speaker 3: her kind of progressivism with with that kind of love
Speaker 3: of well regulated markets, whereas kind of traditional socialist types
Speaker 3: are fine with big big as good for them because
Speaker 3: that's a bigger company to be organized, nationalized, nationalized and regulated.
Speaker 3: And there's a you know, there's a as as John
Speaker 3: Kenneth Galbraith would talk about, there's like a kind of
Speaker 3: fine line between, you know, something that is firmly, solidly
Speaker 3: regulated and controlled by the state and something that's outright nationalized.
Speaker 3: Like some ways it's you're just talking at the margins
Speaker 3: at that point.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and that's where I think, you know, we would
Speaker 4: we would we starved apart because you know, it's it's
Speaker 4: it's very difficult and there's there's very little precedent, I
Speaker 4: think for not having a symbiotic, sort of croneous relationship
Speaker 4: at that point. But to the point of people from
Speaker 4: Warren World and like in your camp, it's the end
Speaker 4: goal isn't cronyism, that symbiotic relationship. It is nationalizing things
Speaker 4: like Twitter.
Speaker 3: Companies or yeah for the Bernie left, but yeah, for
Speaker 3: the Warren right left there like just it's fundamentally kind
Speaker 3: of conservative impulse. So it makes sense that there's this
Speaker 3: alliance there.
Speaker 4: Yeah, absolutely right. You were on Capitol Hill yesterday, you
Speaker 4: were following literally a drama and all the dynamics. What
Speaker 4: have you got for us on this shutdown? That is
Speaker 4: definitely coming up?
Speaker 3: So we're headed for a government shutdown on Saturday. Even
Speaker 3: though a majority of Republicans in the Senate on Tuesday
Speaker 3: voted to move forward on a bipartisan spending bill to
Speaker 3: keep it open. That's because a group of House Republicans
Speaker 3: is refusing to let anything come to the floor that
Speaker 3: can pass into law, basically guaranteeing a shutdown. In doing so,
Speaker 3: they're following the orders of former President Donald Trump, even
Speaker 3: though it's clear Republicans will get blamed for it and
Speaker 3: take a political hit. The only person who could benefit, actually,
Speaker 3: besides Joe Biden from this is Donald Trump, who is
Speaker 3: facing multiple federal indictments that he's been working hard to
Speaker 3: delay past the election. The federal courts can stay open
Speaker 3: for about two weeks thanks to the fees they collect,
Speaker 3: but after that they'd have to shut down, gumming everything
Speaker 3: up and throwing the court calendar into chaos. Now, Republicans
Speaker 3: spent Tuesday evening jawing at each other. Florida Representative Matt Gates,
Speaker 3: one of the Republican firebrands leading the shutdown charge, to
Speaker 3: his credit, had the knight's best joke. Let me hand
Speaker 3: the mic to him.
Speaker 11: We are devaluing American money so rapidly that in America
Speaker 11: today you can't even bribe Democrat senators with cash alone.
Speaker 11: You need to bring gold bars to get the job done,
Speaker 11: just so that the bribes hold value.
Speaker 3: All right, that was pretty good. He also lashed out
Speaker 3: at Speaker Kevin McCarthy on Twitter, calling him quote pathetic
Speaker 3: for a paid advocacy campaign Gates said had attempted to
Speaker 3: pay Republican influencers to trash talk Gates and his shutdown effort.
Speaker 3: McCarthy issued a cease and desist order to a consulting
Speaker 3: firm which appears to be or is accused of being
Speaker 3: at least democratic. Emily knows more about this than me,
Speaker 3: and we'll sort this that one out in a minute maybe.
Speaker 3: But the Gates McCarthy drama continued. Here's McCarthy getting asked
Speaker 3: about him.
Speaker 5: Matt Gates made another thread chair speakership on the House
Speaker 5: floor today. Are you worried at.
Speaker 8: All that to bring up us here?
Speaker 4: When you make of the threats He's made them for
Speaker 4: quite a while.
Speaker 9: Have you seen Matt and what he said about me
Speaker 9: when we first started this. Look, people have got to
Speaker 9: get over personal differences. I'm focused on America. I think
Speaker 9: that's where America's looking right now as well. He never
Speaker 9: voted for me to start out with. I don't assume
Speaker 9: he's changing his position. He said a lot of things
Speaker 9: and we waded through. The one thing I will always
Speaker 9: tell you is I'm never going to give up on America.
Speaker 9: And that's where my focus is going to be. If
Speaker 9: somebody has a personal difference with me, that's fine. They
Speaker 9: have the right to say it, they have the right
Speaker 9: to do it. Do whatever there is that.
Speaker 12: Distracted this process, though, when he keeps hammering you on this,
Speaker 12: is that a problem? I mean, he comes out every
Speaker 12: day with a little more pushing the involop does well,
Speaker 12: That's why I'm.
Speaker 4: Asking you no if it doesn't.
Speaker 12: But that is that distracted from this whole issue to
Speaker 12: fund the government address?
Speaker 8: No, but it seems to do something for you.
Speaker 3: Now, I don't think people quite have a grasp of
Speaker 3: how thoroughly absurd the Freedom Caucus position is on a
Speaker 3: government shutdown, and it's not even the entire Freedom Caucus. Now,
Speaker 3: I know it sounds like I'm speaking from a partisan
Speaker 3: perspective here or saying that I disagree with their approach.
Speaker 3: But what I'm trying to say is that what they're
Speaker 3: doing isn't wrong, it's just completely insane. So to put
Speaker 3: it simply, Republicans previously agreed to a very specific deal
Speaker 3: to fund the government. They have not made any serious
Speaker 3: demands or proposed any way forward that would keep the
Speaker 3: government open. Yet they are still pushing for a shutdown.
Speaker 3: They can't even pass a bill through their own chamber
Speaker 3: that would fund the government. They're not even proposing big
Speaker 3: changes to federal spending because they already took that off
Speaker 3: the table during Biden's State of the Union.
Speaker 6: Some Republicans want medicare and solid security sunset.
Speaker 8: I'm not saying it's a majority.
Speaker 3: Of Let me give you.
Speaker 6: Anybody who dots it, contact my office. I'll give you
Speaker 6: a copy. I'll give you a copy of the proposal
Speaker 6: that means Congress doesn't vote. Well, I'm glad to see
Speaker 6: you now. I tell you I enjoyed conversion.
Speaker 3: So with Medicare and solid security off the table, that's
Speaker 3: left Republicans nibbling at the edges. Now, perhaps It seems
Speaker 3: like too long ago, but this whole thing was already
Speaker 3: worked out. In May, Biden and McCarthy, as you'll recall,
Speaker 3: sat down to craft a deal to avert a default
Speaker 3: and a global financial crisis. The deal was straightforward, and
Speaker 3: it was announced publicly. The debt ceiling would be lifted
Speaker 3: until January twenty twenty five, so a lame du Congress
Speaker 3: coincidentally can lift it again. Discretionary and military spending for
Speaker 3: the next fiscal year would be capped at one point
Speaker 3: five nine trillion dollars, eight hundred and eighty six billion
Speaker 3: for the war making folks and seven hundred and four
Speaker 3: billion for the rest. So all of this has already
Speaker 3: been hashed out. As Hank Williams Junior would put it,
Speaker 3: it's all over. But the crying now. The holdouts are
Speaker 3: calling for budget numbers several hundred billion dollars below what
Speaker 3: was already agreed on, which is fine, that's their right,
Speaker 3: but it doesn't mean anybody should listen to them. So
Speaker 3: today McCarthy suggested he needs another meeting with Biden, which
Speaker 3: the White House quickly rejected, noting they already cut a deal,
Speaker 3: and his problem is with Matt Gates and that crew
Speaker 3: not with the White House now. AOC suggested McCarthy be
Speaker 3: told to quote pound sand, which is actually one of
Speaker 3: my favorite cliches out there. Meanwhile, these votes are a
Speaker 3: trap for Republicans because they'll never be good enough for
Speaker 3: the most ardent conservatives, and they'll include draconian cuts and
Speaker 3: extreme social policy that will then be used against modern
Speaker 3: Republicans running and Biden districts. Here's how the Washington Post
Speaker 3: framed the latest proposed cuts. Quote, cutting housing subsidies for
Speaker 3: the poor by thirty three percent as soaring rents drive
Speaker 3: a national affordability crisis, forcing more than one million women
Speaker 3: and children onto the waitlist of a nutritional assistance program
Speaker 3: for poor mothers with young children, reducing federal spending on
Speaker 3: home heating assistance for low income families by more than
Speaker 3: seventy percent with energy prices high heading into the winter months. Unquote.
Speaker 3: That's not just terrible for people, it's terrible politics. Now,
Speaker 3: once that theater is over, the only option will be
Speaker 3: a normal, clean, bipartisan CR. The Senate voted seventy seven
Speaker 3: to nineteen to move forward on a CR yesterday evening
Speaker 3: to keep the government open another forty seven days. But
Speaker 3: they also added some six billion dollars for Ukraine and
Speaker 3: another six billion dollars for disaster relief, and House Republican
Speaker 3: holdouts want nothing to do with that Ukraine money. Now
Speaker 3: here's where McCarthy faces a choice. He can prevent the
Speaker 3: Senate bill, which has a support of mitchma Connell and
Speaker 3: a host of Republicans, from coming to the floor. His
Speaker 3: right wing rebels have said that if he passes it
Speaker 3: with Democratic votes, they'll depose him, and they might, but
Speaker 3: A they don't have an alternative who could get two
Speaker 3: hundred and eighteen votes, and b Democrats could vote to
Speaker 3: save him, which would be c absolutely hilarious. So what
Speaker 3: result are we.
Speaker 4: Going to get here the Ukraine spending?
Speaker 3: Emily, what's your point today, Well, a.
Speaker 4: New poll was just released today by American Compass that
Speaker 4: is a conservative organization working on sort of new right
Speaker 4: realignment issues. You may be familiar with it because we've
Speaker 4: had the head of American Compass, or In Cass, on
Speaker 4: the show on Breaking Points and on Counterpoints several times,
Speaker 4: because Orn has really interesting perspective. He was actually recently
Speaker 4: profiled by New York Magazine as quote the Nerd trying
Speaker 4: to turn the GOP populist, and he has drawn some
Speaker 4: attention because a lot of the policy prescriptions that come
Speaker 4: out of an American compass are wildly against opposed to
Speaker 4: Republican orthodoxy on things like unions, on things like private equity, financialization,
Speaker 4: Wall Street, et cetera, et cetera. And these poll results
Speaker 4: I think are worth the Republicans here in Washington taking
Speaker 4: a look at and then weighing against what some of
Speaker 4: their benefactors over on Wall Street. Although you know that
Speaker 4: relationship is strained in many cases. If you're talking to
Speaker 4: people both on Wall Street and in Republican politics because
Speaker 4: of cultural issues, this is worth paying attention to. There's
Speaker 4: a Republican primary happening right now, There's a debate happening tonight.
Speaker 4: We'll see how well these priorities are captured, both by
Speaker 4: the candidates and by the moderators. So on tariffs and
Speaker 4: on Wall Street, you have Republican voters. This is a
Speaker 4: pull just of Republican voters. It was taken between August
Speaker 4: eleventh and seventeenth. The sample is one thousand people or
Speaker 4: a thousand Republican voters. It was done by you Gov.
Speaker 4: This is Republicans who voted in the twenty twenty two election.
Speaker 4: They were over in favor of tariffs and had a
Speaker 4: very very negative opinion of Wall Street. Now, the way
Speaker 4: the questions were written, and you can go take a
Speaker 4: look at the poll yourself, the way the questions are written.
Speaker 4: I'm not going to read through all of them here.
Speaker 4: I think it was maybe nudging people in that direction.
Speaker 4: But you can look at other polls. I mean, Republican
Speaker 4: voters right now have I think it found it finds
Speaker 4: like forty percent support for unions. You can see that
Speaker 4: in polls throughout the country. There is increasing support for
Speaker 4: unions nationwide, not just among Republican voters, but favorability among
Speaker 4: Republican voters is increasing. And part of that is because
Speaker 4: you have union voters who may have only pulled the
Speaker 4: lever for Democrats in the past, now interested in Republicans.
Speaker 4: Maybe because as we talked about earlier in the show,
Speaker 4: they were unhappy with the UAW, they have been unhappy
Speaker 4: with leadership, or maybe because of cultural issues. I think
Speaker 4: in many cases that's exactly what it is. But nevertheless,
Speaker 4: those are the facts. And you have Donald Trump going
Speaker 4: tonight to talk to Auto workers, non union auto workers,
Speaker 4: and a non union plant. As we talked earlier in
Speaker 4: the show, trying to actually drive this wedge because the
Speaker 4: unions themselves have have looked at the Biden administration's Green
Speaker 4: Agenda policies and said, wait a minute, this isn't actually
Speaker 4: in line with our agenda. We're giving you lots of money,
Speaker 4: We're giving you lots of support. Let's talk about this
Speaker 4: sore all. There's this explosion of priorities in the labor
Speaker 4: space right now, and things are you know, it's sort
Speaker 4: of the house of cards has been knocked over, and
Speaker 4: we're seeing where everything is going to land, and Republicans
Speaker 4: would be wise to pay attention to where their own
Speaker 4: voters seem to want them to land. Now, let's look
Speaker 4: at other things. We can put figure one up on
Speaker 4: the screen. This is really really interesting. They asked about
Speaker 4: top issues for Republican voters. So the question was, which
Speaker 4: do you think are the most important challenges facing America?
Speaker 4: Please select at least two and up to five. So
Speaker 4: if you're looking at this screen not listening, I'm going
Speaker 4: to break this down for listeners right here. What's going
Speaker 4: to jump out at you is that sixty nine percent
Speaker 4: of respondents picked transgender active. Now again they're picking at
Speaker 4: least two and potentially up to five, so this means
Speaker 4: they picked it in a basket of at least two
Speaker 4: to five so among other things, but that was the
Speaker 4: top one that was selected by the most people, so
Speaker 4: sixty nine percent. Then it goes down to woke corporations
Speaker 4: sixty two percent, critical race theory fifty two percent, illegal
Speaker 4: immigration sixty percent, So that's likely within the margin of error,
Speaker 4: so sixty percent with woke corporations and illegal immigration, Family
Speaker 4: fertility done at thirteen percent, higher education all the way
Speaker 4: done at eight percent, globalization fifty percent, worker power eleven percent,
Speaker 4: financialization nine percent. And then what American compass prioritize or
Speaker 4: categorized as old right priorities, regulation, tax rates, and free trade.
Speaker 4: Regulation is at twenty eight percent, tax rates are at
Speaker 4: eighteen percent, and free trade is at ten percent. So
Speaker 4: those are very generic and broad categories, right, But even
Speaker 4: using the kind of friendly term to free trade by
Speaker 4: actually just calling it free trade is only down at
Speaker 4: ten ten percent of people saying that's among their priorities.
Speaker 4: That is a different question than whether people support free trade.
Speaker 4: Of course, whether it's a priority and whether you support
Speaker 4: it are totally different questions. And I think that's one
Speaker 4: of the biggest questions that Republicans are facing right now.
Speaker 4: It's not only you know what are are you out
Speaker 4: there talking about right to work? Or are you out
Speaker 4: there talking about the fact that people in these labor
Speaker 4: unions are underpaid? Those are right? Which one are you emphasizing?
Speaker 4: You may believe in right to work, but you may
Speaker 4: also believe that the workers are underpaid, and you should
Speaker 4: probably emphasize right now, like Josh Holly did when you
Speaker 4: went to the picket line, that people deserve higher pay.
Speaker 4: So that's the question of priorities. Is what's on the table?
Speaker 4: Here is what's on the table for national Republicans, And
Speaker 4: I think this poll is actually genuinely a very interesting
Speaker 4: glimpse into that. And as American Compass puts it, unsurprisingly,
Speaker 4: the cultural issues most often selected are therefore all also
Speaker 4: those on which voters want to see if politicians focus
Speaker 4: most time and attention. They asked respondents to rank where
Speaker 4: they want people. They gave them a hypothetical one hundred
Speaker 4: points for politicians, and ask them where they would want
Speaker 4: politicians to spend most of their time and sort of
Speaker 4: allocate those one hundred points to these different issues. Overall,
Speaker 4: voters allocated, according to Compass, forty four percent of their
Speaker 4: points to the cultural challenges, twenty three to consensus challenges,
Speaker 4: nineteen percent to new right challenges, and fourteen percent to
Speaker 4: old right challenges. What's interesting there is also that these
Speaker 4: cultural challenges are kind of new right challenges as well,
Speaker 4: because the RNC back in twenty twelve basically said let's
Speaker 4: put cultural priorities, immigration, all of that stuff on the
Speaker 4: back burner in order to win new voters. So I
Speaker 4: think actually you could even fairly classify those cultural challenges
Speaker 4: as new right challenges. And I'd also just like to
Speaker 4: emphasize that a huge problem in the Republican Party is
Speaker 4: not classifying cultural challenges as financial challenges. So when people
Speaker 4: are saying, for instance, that transgender activism is one of
Speaker 4: their top priorities, the way Republicans don't think of that,
Speaker 4: and you could argue that's because of the donor class.
Speaker 4: You could argue that's because it's the disproportionate influence of
Speaker 4: what some people see is the old moral majority wing
Speaker 4: of the conservative movement. But what I think Republicans are
Speaker 4: wrong not to not to emphasize is that when people
Speaker 4: are worried about that, a lot of times that's because
Speaker 4: it is a financial worry for them. It's a financial
Speaker 4: issue because they disagree with what their public schools are teaching,
Speaker 4: which in some cases are actually very very extreme, and
Speaker 4: that means they have to go spend time looking for
Speaker 4: a private school that is expensive. It means that their
Speaker 4: tax money that they're paying to the public school is
Speaker 4: not going to their kids' tuition. It's being spent in
Speaker 4: ways they don't think is benefiting the community. And so
Speaker 4: that lens is not just like we see these things
Speaker 4: as sort of mutually exclusive, right, like it's either economic
Speaker 4: or cultural, when in fact, so often the cultural issues
Speaker 4: are economic issues and when people We'll look at that
Speaker 4: chart and maybe we can pop it up on the
Speaker 4: screaming screen again. This is figure one, and you see
Speaker 4: that eye popping number of sixty nine percent of people
Speaker 4: specifically pointing to transgender activism as the most important challenge
Speaker 4: facing America, one of the most important challenges facing America.
Speaker 4: And then you also see the same thing with woke
Speaker 4: corporations critical race theory. I would posit that a lot
Speaker 4: of that is because it creates financial hurdles for people
Speaker 4: just to live by their own values and values they
Speaker 4: see as basically consensus values. You know, people shouldn't be
Speaker 4: you know, the men and women the locker rooms. The
Speaker 4: locker room issue is difficult. They want to be able
Speaker 4: to shop at Target without you know, having issues with it.
Speaker 4: They want to be able to buy their bud light
Speaker 4: without feeling insulted by the company. And again, those issues
Speaker 4: may seem small ball to people here in Washington, they
Speaker 4: may seem like cultural red meat, but I think it
Speaker 4: also has something serious to do with people's pocketbooks too. Ryan,
Speaker 4: what did you make of the poll and what do
Speaker 4: you make of that question of how a lot of
Speaker 4: people in Washington, d c c. The economy, and the
Speaker 4: culture as sort of mutually exclusive realms that are not,
Speaker 4: you know, in any ways, have that middle vend diagram.
Speaker 3: Part Yeah, the transgender number.
Speaker 4: That's all right. So, as we were prepping the show
Speaker 4: last night, news broke that House Republican is alleging Anthony
Speaker 4: Fauci secretly went to CIA headquarters to quote influence the
Speaker 4: COVID nineteen origins investigation. We are going to talk now
Speaker 4: with Toby Green he's a professor of African history at
Speaker 4: King's College, London. His latest book, co authored with Thomas Fozzi,
Speaker 4: is the COVID Consensus. He has been covering this as
Speaker 4: it relates to Africa, the African continent. Let's put up
Speaker 4: on the screen a persuasion article that Toby authored recently,
Speaker 4: which is so fascinating, just a really, really really good read.
Speaker 4: I highly recommend giving it a look. Toby, thank you
Speaker 4: so much for joining us today.
Speaker 8: Thanks very much, Amy, thanks and Ryan, thanks good to
Speaker 8: be here.
Speaker 4: Yeah, so you've we've written about the African content on this.
Speaker 4: You've written about Niger in recent news about the coup there.
Speaker 4: I want to start with the Persuasion article because I
Speaker 4: feel like you encapsulate a broad sort of critique of
Speaker 4: the West as it has affected seriously had had serious
Speaker 4: consequences for the African continent throughout the Western response to
Speaker 4: COVID nineteen. Could you tell us just a little bit
Speaker 4: about what you're reporting in the Persuasion article and how
Speaker 4: these things have affected Africa.
Speaker 8: Yeah, thanks very much for the question. Emily.
Speaker 13: Well, I mean, in the Persuasion article, I'm documenting what
Speaker 13: has happened effectively in terms of the pandemic response on
Speaker 13: the African continent.
Speaker 8: That and we need to go.
Speaker 13: Back a little bit, back to Thebola epidemic, which many
Speaker 13: of your listeners and viewers will know about twenty fourteen
Speaker 13: twenty fifteen. At that time, short lockdowns were trialed in Freetown,
Speaker 13: in Sierra Leone and in Monrovian Liberia. And at the
Speaker 13: time medsasal fontie A Doctors Without Borders said really warned
Speaker 13: against this, that it would be a bad idea. Subsequent
Speaker 13: academic research confirmed that it had been counterproductive. So already
Speaker 13: prior to COVID nineteen, Meta Medical, the world medical establishment,
Speaker 13: you know, was aware of the fact that in a
Speaker 13: situation on the African continent, where as the international labor
Speaker 13: organizations had eighty five percent of workers depend on on
Speaker 13: the informal market, lockdown's simply don't work. In fact, and
Speaker 13: in fact, I had a friend in Nigeria, Clican in
Speaker 13: Nigeria who later told me, you know, this is a
Speaker 13: policy which could work in our context for three days.
Speaker 13: And so what the article does is document the history
Speaker 13: of how it was already known that this was a
Speaker 13: project policy which didn't work in the context of the
Speaker 13: informal labor market.
Speaker 8: Already by March.
Speaker 13: Twenty twenty, scientists were saying, well, actually, you know, Africa
Speaker 13: has a much lower median age. It was in fact
Speaker 13: under twenty recognized by the UN in twenty nineteen, and
Speaker 13: already suggesting it would have that COVID might have a
Speaker 13: different outcome, questioning whether or not this were there for
Speaker 13: appropriate policies and how social distancing could possibly work in
Speaker 13: a context where, you know, informal settlements people live in
Speaker 13: very overcrowded conditions. And yet the WHO recommended in its
Speaker 13: February twenty fifth, twenty twenty report that every country when
Speaker 13: U cases were found should follow non pharmaceutical interventions, should
Speaker 13: follow policies of restriction, isolation, quarantine, and never really pushed
Speaker 13: back on the fact that when this was pushed out
Speaker 13: across the African continent, this was going to have catastrophic consequences.
Speaker 13: So the article summarizes all of that and looks at
Speaker 13: the long term consequences, which is, you know, what people
Speaker 13: talk about is almost a decade of austerity to come
Speaker 13: on the continent, which is going to be catastrophic for
Speaker 13: future health outcomes.
Speaker 3: And before we unpack some of those consequences. I just
Speaker 3: want to linger on the who here. So how does
Speaker 3: it work in practice? So who says, all right, you've
Speaker 3: got cases, here's the protocol you are to follow. Who
Speaker 3: says a lot of things? Why did it end up
Speaker 3: getting implemented and what what was the kind of discipline
Speaker 3: mechanism that led to it or were their interest within
Speaker 3: those particular countries that wanted to see lockdowns implemented?
Speaker 4: By the way, and this is who leadership? The first
Speaker 4: African leadership Doctor tedros is Ethiopian at the time of
Speaker 4: both the Bowler and into the COVID pandemic.
Speaker 13: He wasn't a leader at the time of a bout it,
Speaker 13: but yes, certainly was in the COVID nineteen pandemic. Yeah,
Speaker 13: I mean this is a very complicated question. It's a
Speaker 13: really good question, Ryan, So thank you for that. There
Speaker 13: are lots of complicated factors at play here.
Speaker 8: You know.
Speaker 13: On the one hand, I interviewed people already colleagues in Ghana,
Speaker 13: for example, and at the.
Speaker 8: Time I was talking to a lot of people daily
Speaker 8: on the continent.
Speaker 13: You know, I've spent a lot of my last twenty
Speaker 13: years in and out of many different countries on the
Speaker 13: continent and people was people did, you know to start with,
Speaker 13: you know, worry about what the consequences might be. So
Speaker 13: I think there was an initial buying that you know,
Speaker 13: this was a serious a serious virus, and that's one
Speaker 13: of the factors that has to be played.
Speaker 8: But on the point of view of you know, why
Speaker 8: then when.
Speaker 13: It became clear pretty pretty soon that consequences were catastrophic.
Speaker 13: I mean, the UNDP on March the thirty first, twenty
Speaker 13: twenty SEU to report saying that half of the jobs
Speaker 13: on the African continent could be lost, I mean half
Speaker 13: of the jobs. I mean, it's quite incredible that at
Speaker 13: that point senior figures in global health and also in
Speaker 13: global you know, in global leadership didn't step back and
Speaker 13: they go, hang on, is this really a sensible policy
Speaker 13: to consume? But so when when that happened, that when
Speaker 13: it became clear that the consequences were what they might be.
Speaker 13: At the same time that well, you know what, having
Speaker 13: interviewed a number of people around the content, you know,
Speaker 13: there was a lot of pressure from doubt, but not
Speaker 13: only from WH. Who's subsidiary. So example, there's a WHO
Speaker 13: subsidary in West Africa, you know, and and a lot
Speaker 13: of core health funding is tied to global health programs
Speaker 13: from the WHO and other partners. So it's actually quite
Speaker 13: hard for ministers of health turn around and say, well,
Speaker 13: you know, you're recommending that we should do that, but.
Speaker 8: We're going to turn around and not do that.
Speaker 13: So, in fact, in an article Chuck alfored quite recently
Speaker 13: with a senior public administrator from the GAMBIAT, he described how,
Speaker 13: in fact, you know, there were weekly demands from embassies,
Speaker 13: Western embassies and partners like the like the World Bank
Speaker 13: IMF for situation reports. They were getting phone calls saying, well,
Speaker 13: we hear people aren't social distancing. We hear there's not
Speaker 13: enough mass compliance.
Speaker 11: Uh.
Speaker 13: And he described that, and this colleague of mine has
Speaker 13: some cca later described that in a subsequent interview. So
Speaker 13: we know that there was lots of informal we could
Speaker 13: you could describe that as informal pressure. But you know,
Speaker 13: when you think about all of the pressures that were
Speaker 13: there and the way in which global governance works and
Speaker 13: finance works, is pretty hard for ministries to turn around
Speaker 13: say we're not doing that, particularly since also, of course,
Speaker 13: the other major partner, economic trade partner in Africa is China,
Speaker 13: and of course this was also a policy which which
Speaker 13: took shape first of all in China.
Speaker 4: That actually reminds me of some of the reporting that
Speaker 4: Ryan and others have done on a Bola and a
Speaker 4: Bola outbreak. And you think you a Tetris was definitely
Speaker 4: not the head of the who doing the bowla outbreak,
Speaker 4: but he had some oversight of their response to the
Speaker 4: Bole outbreak. And it's all of these strings, these Western
Speaker 4: strings attached to what happens in Africa that create an
Speaker 4: incentive system that seems just like it's it's very difficult
Speaker 4: for governments and for people to break through, and it
Speaker 4: becomes a laboratory basically for the West. And I wanted
Speaker 4: to ask Tobe how this sort of what the economic
Speaker 4: outlook and like what sort of concretely can we look
Speaker 4: at in different African countries right now and say this
Speaker 4: is downstream of a sort of foolish Western COVID response.
Speaker 4: You wrote in the New State Statesman. We can put
Speaker 4: this is the third element up. This is about the
Speaker 4: coup and niche air. You've you've covered this, You've written
Speaker 4: about the Can you walk us through a little bit
Speaker 4: of what it looks like on the ground in some
Speaker 4: of these countries right now.
Speaker 13: Yeah, I mean, I mean I did you know, I've
Speaker 13: recently been in the gambur in Senegal, and you know,
Speaker 13: I mean, just to give her sense of it, you know,
Speaker 13: And this might sound strange to an American you know,
Speaker 13: American audience, but you know, I didn't meet a single person,
Speaker 13: I literally not a single person, you know, including senior
Speaker 13: government you know, MP's senior administrators who did not think
Speaker 13: that the entire COVID response not only had been a catastrophe,
Speaker 13: you know also I mean, I don't want to use
Speaker 13: the word fraud, but you know they literally did not
Speaker 13: know hardly anybody who you know, fallen ill from COVID.
Speaker 13: They and you know, they would talk that people were
Speaker 13: claiming that they had gone to hospital with malaria symptoms
Speaker 13: they were diagnosed with COVID. I mean, this is so,
Speaker 13: whether or not this is true, what's interesting, I think
Speaker 13: is how if this is now being perceived, it's now
Speaker 13: being perceived definitely as you know, a real neo colonial
Speaker 13: imposition which had a catastrophic impacts. And I'll give you
Speaker 13: an example. You know, I've got a very old friend
Speaker 13: rather than for thirty years in Senegal to COVID. He
Speaker 13: had a business on a motor He had his own motorbike.
Speaker 13: He would go down to the coast, he would buy
Speaker 13: fish and he would bring it, you know, a couple
Speaker 13: of hours in land and he would sell it at market.
Speaker 13: And that business was destroyed and collapsed in twenty twenty
Speaker 13: because they were people weren't have to travel. And then
Speaker 13: what happened was people had to spend any money that
Speaker 13: they had in order to be able to get food
Speaker 13: to eat. And still now when I met him a
Speaker 13: month or so ago, he you know, he said he
Speaker 13: can't start up that business again because people literally have
Speaker 13: not got any money to buy anything other than the
Speaker 13: basic sack of rice, oil.
Speaker 8: And of course the other factor there is inflation.
Speaker 13: You know, obviously the whole world has been experiencing inflation,
Speaker 13: but it has been very severe in Africa, and in fact,
Speaker 13: some of the interviews I've done, which we discussed it
Speaker 13: in the COVID Consensus, with people say, you know this
Speaker 13: started in twenty twenty one. Because what happened I mean,
Speaker 13: and I wrote about this with Hassum CS in the
Speaker 13: article a couple of months ago. What happened was that,
Speaker 13: for example, in the Gambia, effectively almost our whole harvest
Speaker 13: was lost. The transport shutdown came at a time when
Speaker 13: people would go and take seeds from the capital city
Speaker 13: to villages. They couldn't do that, and those who did
Speaker 13: manage to plant, because of social distancing protocols, didn't have
Speaker 13: enough people in the fields to harvest. I was told
Speaker 13: of colleague in Angola that, you know, people simply weren't
Speaker 13: allowed to go to the fields and so they lost
Speaker 13: to harvest. Similar stories from Ghana, and that caused effectively
Speaker 13: a huge increase in prices already by twenty twenty one.
Speaker 13: So you have all those factors coming together and people
Speaker 13: are angry, and you know, and that's what I wrote
Speaker 13: about in the article in the year you know that
Speaker 13: what has happened is you know, not only I think,
Speaker 13: as I mentioned in the Persuasion article. You know, prior
Speaker 13: to twenty twenty, people were talking about Africa rising. You know,
Speaker 13: this was in many ways a really hopeful, autimistic time
Speaker 13: with the continent. The economy had boomed throughout the twenty tens.
Speaker 13: Now the same journals are talking about, you know, a
Speaker 13: decade of austerity, and the evidence is quite clear that
Speaker 13: they started in twenty twenty one.
Speaker 8: You know it's and it's linked to what happened in
Speaker 8: twenty twenty and it's so fat.
Speaker 3: Toby, thanks so much for joining us and for your
Speaker 3: sharing your reporting here. Really appreciate it.
Speaker 8: Thank you, Ryan, Thank you Emily.
Speaker 4: Of course Toby's book is called the COVID Consensus. He
Speaker 4: just mentioned it, so you can check that out. That
Speaker 4: does it for us today on Counterpoints. We so appreciate
Speaker 4: everybody tuning into the show. Make sure to like subscribe.
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Speaker 4: appreciate it.
Speaker 3: And we will be here tomorrow morning with Cryslin Sagar
Speaker 3: with a kind of debate coverage special and maybe a
Speaker 3: little Trump speech to non union workers special as well.
Speaker 4: Yeah, well we'll have it all for you tomorrow morning.
Speaker 4: We'll be back so you don't have to wait another
Speaker 4: week to get your macro dose. Ryan Grim, see you
Speaker 4: guys tomorrow