Speaker 1: Hi, I'm Molly John Fast and this is Fast Politics,
Speaker 1: where we discussed the top political headlines with some of
Speaker 1: today's best minds, and eighty nine year old Senator Dianne
Speaker 1: Feinstein has refused to give a timeline for her return
Speaker 1: to Congress.
Speaker 2: We have such a great show today.
Speaker 1: Axios's Felix Salmon tells us about his new book, The
Speaker 1: Phoenix Economy, Work Life and Money in the New Not Normal.
Speaker 1: Then we'll talk to former political director of the AFL
Speaker 1: CIO Mike pod Horzer about America's Union movement. But first
Speaker 1: we have the former Vermont governor and presidential candidate and
Speaker 1: close personal friend.
Speaker 2: Howard Dean.
Speaker 1: Welcome back to Fast Politics, Howard Dean.
Speaker 3: Thank you very much for having me.
Speaker 2: In the Bucolic wiles of Vermont.
Speaker 3: Yes, and there beautiful and bu college.
Speaker 2: Yes, and very blue state, very blue state.
Speaker 4: Well, we consider blue insane to be similar adjectives.
Speaker 2: Right, So tell me what I mean.
Speaker 1: You're a doctor, so I feel like you also can
Speaker 1: speak to what is happening right now. I feel like
Speaker 1: I mean, part of what's happening right now with the
Speaker 1: Republican Party is a rejection of science of medicine.
Speaker 3: Well, that's true, but this is a pattern that is
Speaker 3: not rare in human history. I mean, what you're seeing
Speaker 3: is a repeat of what has happened over centuries, where
Speaker 3: people deny the truth, put out propaganda, and base their
Speaker 3: campaigns based on hate and anger. Right and the Republican Party.
Speaker 4: Not all Republicans are like this, but more and more
Speaker 4: are like it because they lack the courage to stand
Speaker 4: up for decency.
Speaker 3: It's fascinating to me.
Speaker 4: I'm watching Asa Hutchinson run, who's coinsistainly not going to
Speaker 4: get anywhere is near and I disagree with his politics,
Speaker 4: but he's make good points like Trump is crazy and
Speaker 4: shouldn't be the nominee and so forth and so on.
Speaker 4: But most of the Republicans don't have any backbone, and
Speaker 4: they're either consumed by hate and anger or they are
Speaker 4: more than willing to play those emotions in the electorate.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I want to ask you about Asa Hutchinson because
Speaker 1: I was reading about him this morning in playbook, And
Speaker 1: this is a guy. He's very conservative, you're not going
Speaker 1: to confuse him with the Democrat.
Speaker 2: But he's also like not a complete lunatic, and.
Speaker 1: He's much more of like a Republican circa two thousand,
Speaker 1: even twenty teen, a Republican pre Trump.
Speaker 4: Well, yeah, I mean, let's not get too nice about
Speaker 4: Asa Hutchinson. I mean, if this were twenty five years ago,
Speaker 4: he'd be on the right edge of his party, right exactly,
Speaker 4: but he wouldn't be consumed by lunacy. He would just be,
Speaker 4: as you just pointed out, a conservative. Now his party
Speaker 4: has become dominated by crackpots, including some of the people
Speaker 4: on the Supreme Court apparently, And so Hutchinson seems reasonable.
Speaker 4: Ronald Reagan is more liberal than every single person running
Speaker 4: for president on the Republican side.
Speaker 3: How do you like those apples?
Speaker 2: Yeah, no, no, I know.
Speaker 1: I mean it just seems to be there on a
Speaker 1: sort of collision course with what is the worst Well.
Speaker 4: Either that, Molly or the country is going to be
Speaker 4: on a collision course with whether we exist or not
Speaker 4: in another fifteen twenty years. And the fascinating thing about
Speaker 4: this is McCarthy is over in Israel, and Israel is
Speaker 4: having exactly the same problem, exactly.
Speaker 1: The same I mean, but with Israel, like our problem
Speaker 1: in America, is that one party is saying a normal
Speaker 1: and one party has completely lost its mind.
Speaker 4: Well that's what's going on over there too, except what
Speaker 4: you have there is the leader who has no scruples
Speaker 4: whatsoever and never has.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: So Trump, Yeah, Well no, Nathan Yaho is much.
Speaker 2: Smarter than Trump, right, obviously.
Speaker 4: Nathan yah who knows exactly what he's doing. But he's
Speaker 4: aligned himself with people who are the party who hated
Speaker 4: anger over there, which is the far right. And they
Speaker 4: make no bones about hating the Palestinians and wanting them
Speaker 4: to get rid of them.
Speaker 3: And they've said so yeah, and the same thing is
Speaker 3: really going on here.
Speaker 4: They no bones about getting rid of gay people, putting
Speaker 4: women in the back of the line, black people back
Speaker 4: in the fields.
Speaker 3: It's just shocking to me.
Speaker 1: But I want to ask you because, like I think
Speaker 1: about so, for example, with abortion, right, like this is
Speaker 1: wildly unpopular. Right, Republicans on abortion wildly unpopular. If anything,
Speaker 1: overturning Row has made the American people for the first
Speaker 1: time really see that abortion is actually healthcare. So then
Speaker 1: you have Ron DeSantis and he decides to ban abortion, Like,
Speaker 1: I mean, doesn't it seem as if these Republicans just
Speaker 1: can't pick a popular position.
Speaker 4: The Santas is a very interesting guy. I don't know
Speaker 4: him personally, and I hope to die in that condition.
Speaker 4: But he's not a very good candidate, and everybody's made
Speaker 4: this big fuss about him. In person, he's kind of
Speaker 4: whiny and do it my way or the highway. And
Speaker 4: he has this incredibly compliant legislature in Florida, which is
Speaker 4: as far as I can guessquin disaster, and they do
Speaker 4: everything he wants.
Speaker 3: It is stunning to me.
Speaker 4: But I actually think Trump is going to beat the
Speaker 4: daylights out of Desantus. And I think I didn't think
Speaker 4: this until about two weeks ago. There's a very very
Speaker 4: good article in Slate by a guy who's I can't
Speaker 4: remember what his name is, but very good. Slate's a
Speaker 4: great publication, and it basically said Desantas took on the
Speaker 4: wrong people and gave a whole history about how Disney
Speaker 4: got where they are and how DeSantis is just making
Speaker 4: one mistake after another.
Speaker 3: It's fascinating to see.
Speaker 4: It's fascinating to watch the Trump mini means destroy themselves
Speaker 4: because they don't know what they're doing. And I mean,
Speaker 4: for all Trump's craziness, he does have an ingrained sense
Speaker 4: of how to play grievance politics right and the other
Speaker 4: ones don't have it because Trump grew up with a
Speaker 4: tyrant for a father and was the survivor and Desanta's
Speaker 4: is just playing a game here, right, But.
Speaker 1: I mean also fundamentally, Trump without the charisma is not a.
Speaker 3: Winner, probably not. Probably not.
Speaker 1: They're involved in the policies which are nothing. I mean,
Speaker 1: why Trump continues to win the Republican nomination is and
Speaker 1: will again likely is because he's scarismatic. What's the reason
Speaker 1: why people win primaries?
Speaker 4: Well, I also think he knows how to play Grievan's politics,
Speaker 4: and none of the others really do, right, I mean,
Speaker 4: Desantas turns out to be kind of whiny and high
Speaker 4: pitched voice and all this kind of stuff. Trump is
Speaker 4: somebody who was born with Grievoy's politics and he learned
Speaker 4: it from his father. And don't forget, Trump's grandfather was
Speaker 4: deported by the United States for not serving in the army,
Speaker 4: and then the Germans wouldn't take him back and made
Speaker 4: him come back here, much to our dismay.
Speaker 3: So yeah, Trump is a different phenomenon.
Speaker 4: He plays to I think, the psychological illnesses of people
Speaker 4: who are angry and feel left behind, and he does
Speaker 4: it incredibly well, because he's sort of convinced himself he's
Speaker 4: one of those too. The Santas is just playing a
Speaker 4: game and he's not that good at it. And that's
Speaker 4: become evident over the last few weeks. You've got to
Speaker 4: read this article in Slate. It is just a masterpiece
Speaker 4: of going back to find out. And this guy's not
Speaker 4: pro Disney, and he's saying, look what Disney got away
Speaker 4: with all this stuff? But now it's basically desantus versus
Speaker 4: whether you're a good grandparent or a parent.
Speaker 2: Right, the happiest place on earth.
Speaker 3: Right exactly.
Speaker 4: So you're encouraging these parents and grandparents to kick their
Speaker 4: kids to the side so you could be president.
Speaker 3: I don't think that's a winning proposal.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: No, he's really bad at this. I mean, so, let
Speaker 1: me ask you about the debt ceiling we have. This
Speaker 1: debt ceiling is on the horizon. June one was the
Speaker 1: Jenny Yellen said June one. It seems like there's ways
Speaker 1: to get around it. I mean, what's your sense on
Speaker 1: how this should go down? I mean, it does seem like,
Speaker 1: in my mind, Republicans want to crash the United States
Speaker 1: economy and like they were just good job numbers, like
Speaker 1: it feels like that's the only goal.
Speaker 2: But I mean, what do you.
Speaker 4: Think I actually, I mean, sensible Republicans don't want to
Speaker 4: crash the United States economy. And I think most of
Speaker 4: the people who write checks to the Republicans don't want
Speaker 4: to crass the United States economy.
Speaker 3: Here's what I think the problem is.
Speaker 4: I think the problem is that McCarthy is incredibly weak
Speaker 4: and probably incapable speaker, and he.
Speaker 3: Has sold his soul to the far right who really
Speaker 3: don't care about the United States economy. They just care
Speaker 3: about themselves.
Speaker 4: And again, their platform is hate and anger and that's
Speaker 4: about it. So there are cuts which are essentially undo
Speaker 4: the United States of America are just ridiculous, and they're
Speaker 4: not going to happen. The cuts of Biden's centerpiece legislation.
Speaker 4: That's not going to happen, my fear. And you can
Speaker 4: say what you want about Bayner and Paul Ryan, who
Speaker 4: got basically chased out by their own caucus, but they
Speaker 4: did have a sense of patriotism. I mean, again, I
Speaker 4: wouldn't vote for them, but that's on ideological grounds. They
Speaker 4: did understand what was going on and what their duty
Speaker 4: to the country was. McCarthy doesn't care about any of that.
Speaker 4: McCarthy just cares about getting elected. But he's a very
Speaker 4: weak person who's pushed around. I mean, if you suddenly
Speaker 4: ally yourself with Marjorie Taylor Green, there's something probably not
Speaker 4: quite there and you're above your shoulders.
Speaker 2: Yeah, he's stupid, right.
Speaker 3: Well, I wasn't going to avoid that word.
Speaker 2: But not smart, it's the other Yes.
Speaker 4: Yes, he lacks foresight. So here's what the problem is.
Speaker 4: The problem is that McCarthy probably is incapable of not
Speaker 4: driving the truck off the cliff. He doesn't know what
Speaker 4: to do, and his instinct will be whatever it takes
Speaker 4: to keep my votes, which means driving the.
Speaker 3: Truck off the cliff. And it's a big cliff.
Speaker 4: And I think we may go over the cliff, but
Speaker 4: only by a few days. But it'll scare the hell
Speaker 4: out of the markets. And I think that will be
Speaker 4: enough to give us the ten or fifteen or twenty
Speaker 4: Republicans in the Congress that don't have a spine but
Speaker 4: do have a conscience and they'll do the right thing.
Speaker 4: And hopefully Hakeem Jefferies, who I don't know well, will
Speaker 4: make it easy for the moderate Republicans who still have
Speaker 4: a conscience, which again is a very small percentage of
Speaker 4: the caucus but does exist, and are also look in
Speaker 4: districts that if they continue this kind of stuff, they're
Speaker 4: going to lose. There's still a number of people in
Speaker 4: Congress Republicans who won in Biden districts. So I think
Speaker 4: that there's a way out. But I don't have much faith,
Speaker 4: not so much in McCarthy's leadership, which I think is
Speaker 4: non existent, But what I don't have much faith in
Speaker 4: is his ability to actually get anything done, because I
Speaker 4: think he has no spine whatsoever.
Speaker 2: Right well, and also he's just not very good at
Speaker 2: those right. I mean, he had to do all of
Speaker 2: these votes to win the speakership. He couldn't get people
Speaker 2: voting for him.
Speaker 1: And also the other thing is we just still don't
Speaker 1: really know what he's promised the far right.
Speaker 3: No, well, we did make a pretty good guess.
Speaker 4: I mean, the package he put together is a joke
Speaker 4: because it's not McConnell says he's going to be on
Speaker 4: the sidelines. I think it's going to be really interesting
Speaker 4: to see McConnell not be on the sidelines, because if
Speaker 4: he's on the sidelines and lets the cliff.
Speaker 3: Everything go over the cliff.
Speaker 4: That impacts greatly his ability to take back the Senate,
Speaker 4: which is all he really cares about it, right.
Speaker 1: I mean, he's had a bit of like leopard eating
Speaker 1: face recently.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I'm not sure what that means.
Speaker 4: I've seen a lot of that, but I know that expression,
Speaker 4: but I don't know what it means.
Speaker 1: It means that when the Trumpers turn on you, oh,
Speaker 1: they won't eat my face. Sooner or later the leopard
Speaker 1: face eating party eats everyone's face.
Speaker 3: Well whatever, Yes.
Speaker 1: So you think that it sort of eventually they can
Speaker 1: just get it together and they push. But then if
Speaker 1: that happens and these models.
Speaker 3: I don't say that I'll go that far.
Speaker 4: I think Biden may have to undergo something like the
Speaker 4: trillion dollar coin or invoking the fourteenth Amendment, which says
Speaker 4: that the good faith in credit the United States will
Speaker 4: never be undermined. But then it goes to a partisan,
Speaker 4: corrupt the organization called the Supreme Court, and who knows
Speaker 4: what they'll do.
Speaker 3: This could end up. I mean, at some point people.
Speaker 4: Are going to start ignoring the Supreme Court, and we're
Speaker 4: not that far from it, and you're certainly going to
Speaker 4: ignore the Supreme Court if the alternative is to plunge
Speaker 4: the economy of the entire world into a blood bath,
Speaker 4: and which is what's going to happen in the United States,
Speaker 4: really does default.
Speaker 3: So I suspect the United States might.
Speaker 4: Default for two days if there's already a deal, and
Speaker 4: if they do, that'll be the end of McCarthy's speakership.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: I mean, do you think that there's a world in
Speaker 1: which some Republicans go over to I mean that seems unlikely, right.
Speaker 4: No, I think it's likely because let's just say, for
Speaker 4: the sake of argument, and who knows what the right
Speaker 4: number really is, Let's say fourteen Republicans from Biden leaning
Speaker 4: districts who are already terrified about abortion are going to
Speaker 4: see people are going to lose their jobs wholesale, including
Speaker 4: a lot of Republican voters in small towns. I mean,
Speaker 4: the full faith credit of the United States is going
Speaker 4: to collapse when this happens. So I think there are
Speaker 4: Republicans are going to go to Hakeem Jefferies and say, look,
Speaker 4: let's just come to a moderate thing and we'll make
Speaker 4: a deal here after it collapses and hopefully Hakim Jeffries
Speaker 4: is not going to say, well, fine, but that means
Speaker 4: we have to have single payer healthcare system and you
Speaker 4: have to vote for it.
Speaker 3: But he's pretty experienced.
Speaker 2: I mean, he seems smart, right, smart.
Speaker 4: Yeah, he seems very capable, but we haven't seen him
Speaker 4: in real action yet.
Speaker 2: Right, It's true, So should die five resign?
Speaker 4: Yes, what she's doing is just selfish. Yeah, it's just
Speaker 4: plain selfish. What she's doing is bad for the country.
Speaker 4: She should resign unless she's going back next week. And
Speaker 4: I don't think that anybody thinks that's true. Right, Frankly,
Speaker 4: I hate to say this because she's more than paid
Speaker 4: her dues, but she shouldn't be there.
Speaker 3: Grassley shouldn't be there.
Speaker 4: There a whole lot of people in the Senate who
Speaker 4: are not playing with a full deck, and they haven't
Speaker 4: been for quite some time.
Speaker 1: But at least and if you want, I mean, I
Speaker 1: feel like, if you're I don't know, with her, it's
Speaker 1: like she's not even there so they can't pass the
Speaker 1: I mean, yeah.
Speaker 4: Yeah, But there's a couple of things I've agreed with
Speaker 4: what used to be a conservative position, I now truly
Speaker 4: believe that we ought to have three term limits in
Speaker 4: the Senate, and we ought to have five or six
Speaker 4: term limits in the House, and I believe the Supreme
Speaker 4: Court ought to be term limited. I mean, this is
Speaker 4: not just the Republican Party of crazy people taking over
Speaker 4: the Republican Party. The political culture has become it's all
Speaker 4: about us, and it's not about the public who we serve.
Speaker 4: And up here in Vermont we have two year terms,
Speaker 4: which I strongly support because if I screw up as governor,
Speaker 4: everybody has a shot at me in two years. And
Speaker 4: the public doesn't like it because they don't like the ads.
Speaker 3: Well, guess what.
Speaker 4: There's a price to living in a democracy, and that
Speaker 4: is you have to listen to crappy ads once in
Speaker 4: a while.
Speaker 2: Is that really why they don't like it.
Speaker 4: Yeah, they don't like all the ads in the campaigns.
Speaker 4: And the money you would, of course up here, is
Speaker 4: not very much. But when the people made up the
Speaker 4: constitutions of these states and the federal government, nobody envisioned
Speaker 4: legislators being full time professional legislators. They were supposed to
Speaker 4: be people who put down their plow for six months
Speaker 4: or four months and came and served and then went
Speaker 4: home and made a real living, and if people made
Speaker 4: a living that was outside the crazy world of politics
Speaker 4: that really is unrelated to most Americans experience, then they
Speaker 4: might be more sensible about what they were doing.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so I want to ask you, now, I mean,
Speaker 1: I think that's pretty reasonable. With this Supreme Court, it's
Speaker 1: clearly very partisan, very crazy.
Speaker 2: You've got but.
Speaker 4: Social corrupt, that's the worst thing. It's been partisans since
Speaker 4: two thousand. There was a really interesting article about Sandrade
Speaker 4: O'Connor's papers coming out that showed that all the time
Speaker 4: she and Ranquist were conniving to make sure that the
Speaker 4: vote count was stopped wasn't continued in Florida.
Speaker 3: That's not their job.
Speaker 4: So the requist was obviously a terrible chief justice. No
Speaker 4: chief justice of either party should decide who the President
Speaker 4: of the United States is on a five to four
Speaker 4: partisan vote with the Republicans in one side of the
Speaker 4: Democrats of another. There's no leadership there at all. So
Speaker 4: that was really the beginning of the undoing of the
Speaker 4: Supreme Court, which is now after twenty three years, obviously
Speaker 4: just rotten.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so it is rotten. So, I mean, what should
Speaker 1: Biden be doing on the Supreme Court? Because it seems like.
Speaker 1: I mean, obviously he would have to win back the House,
Speaker 1: but that's not impossible.
Speaker 2: I mean, what do you think should happen there?
Speaker 4: I tell you what I think should happen, and a
Speaker 4: lot of lawyers disagree with me.
Speaker 3: And I'm not a lawyer, so I don't pretend expertise.
Speaker 2: You're a doctor, So.
Speaker 4: That doesn't always help you when you're trying to figure
Speaker 4: out what the law does.
Speaker 3: So, first of all, you're obviously not going to get
Speaker 3: a constitutional amendment. The country's much too polarized, and it's
Speaker 3: a very good thing to do.
Speaker 4: They won't even vote for equal women's rights, so what
Speaker 4: makes you think they're going to vote to change the court.
Speaker 3: So what can you do without a constitutional amendment?
Speaker 4: Well, the Constitution of the United States says that basically
Speaker 4: that appointments to the federal bench are for life, and
Speaker 4: that was put in for a good reason. It was
Speaker 4: intended so that the courts will be removed from the
Speaker 4: daily fights about political fights, and it served us well
Speaker 4: for quite a while, but now it's become partisan. And
Speaker 4: of course lately the corruption has been unveiled, not just
Speaker 4: with Justice Thomas, but Gorsich. John Roberts's wife getting ten
Speaker 4: million dollars by being a recruiter for legal firms or
Speaker 4: saying business in front of the court. It means it's
Speaker 4: a corrupt mess. So the Constitution says that you cannot
Speaker 4: remove somebody without impeachment process, which we're obviously not going
Speaker 4: to go through with this Congress. And you can't remove
Speaker 4: people from the federal bench once you've appointed them. It
Speaker 4: does not say that they are entitled to a life
Speaker 4: term on the Supreme Court. So you could rotate them
Speaker 4: off the Supreme Court onto a circuit court.
Speaker 3: And they would still be on the federal bench.
Speaker 4: And so I think there is room to create by
Speaker 4: statue a law that says you get eighteen years on
Speaker 4: the Supreme Court and you get staggered terms. You stop
Speaker 4: all this nonsense about confirmation dancing around and not what
Speaker 4: McConnell did, the two steps to prevent Obama from naming
Speaker 4: a justice and then naming another justice with.
Speaker 3: Six days to go. This kind of stuff, no.
Speaker 4: Wonder people think the court is a disaster. So you
Speaker 4: can give them an eighteen year term as long as
Speaker 4: you don't take them off the bench when their term
Speaker 4: is over. And then you ought to be able to
Speaker 4: set up a fixed schedule so people can make appointments
Speaker 4: to the bench. I also don't believe I believe that
Speaker 4: the structure of bench. Obviously, the Federalist Society has blown
Speaker 4: up the structure of how you do this.
Speaker 3: So what a surprise.
Speaker 4: Vermont actually has a great system where I don't get
Speaker 4: to pick anybody I want. There's a non partisan commission
Speaker 4: made up of the chair of both houses, digitiary committees, chairman,
Speaker 4: and the Bar Association and who knows what, and they
Speaker 4: interview and present me with, say, with five candidates. I
Speaker 4: can reject all five, and I had to do that
Speaker 4: once because they were playing games and trying to get
Speaker 4: their personal on. But generally speaking, that's who I have
Speaker 4: to choose from.
Speaker 3: So you get rid of.
Speaker 4: All this Leonard Leo federalist dark money crap, and you
Speaker 4: take the politics out of the Supreme Court and people
Speaker 4: actually respect the court when you do that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean that seems like it makes a lot
Speaker 1: of sense. Howard Dan, thank you so much for joining us.
Speaker 3: It's my great pleasure.
Speaker 2: As always, it's always such a delight to have you.
Speaker 4: Well, may we all as a country do better because
Speaker 4: we're in pretty bad shape right now.
Speaker 2: I mean we can't do worse, right, Oh, yes we can.
Speaker 1: Felix Salmon is the chief financial correspondent at Axios and
Speaker 1: the author of The Phoenix Economy, Work Life.
Speaker 2: And Money in the New Not Normal.
Speaker 1: Welcome to Fast Politics, Felix Salmon.
Speaker 5: I'm super happy to be here. This is very exciting.
Speaker 2: Yeah, we're nothing if not exciting over here.
Speaker 1: So let me ask you have a piece that was
Speaker 1: published ten hours ago. I love this specificity in which
Speaker 1: we can deal with such things about the current banking crisis,
Speaker 1: and the title is Welcome to the New Not Normal.
Speaker 2: Explain to us what is happening with these banks?
Speaker 5: Okay, So the banks are suffering from something very unexpected.
Speaker 5: And this is the big thesis of my book is
Speaker 5: that we have to expect the unexpected. We're in this
Speaker 5: new world to call the new not Normal, where unexpected
Speaker 5: things five impossible things happened before breakfast, the Red Queen
Speaker 5: would put it. And this is one of those things. Right.
Speaker 5: This is not a banking crisis where the banks made
Speaker 5: bad loans and then they go bust. All of the
Speaker 5: loans are fine. The First Republics loans were fine. Silicon
Speaker 5: Valley banks, loans were fine. What the real problem was
Speaker 5: was that they had too much money. That we had
Speaker 5: all of this money get created and spent over the
Speaker 5: course of the pandemic for very good fiscal reasons, and
Speaker 5: that money found its way into these bank accounts in California.
Speaker 5: And then when the banks found themselves sitting on all
Speaker 5: this money, they had to do something with it.
Speaker 2: Well, they didn't have to, but they wanted to.
Speaker 5: Well, they had to, Like, if you're a bank and
Speaker 5: someone deposits money.
Speaker 3: With you, you.
Speaker 5: Have that money, you have to put it somewhere, right
Speaker 5: or First Republic Bank or even Signature bank for that matter.
Speaker 5: All of these banks that failed had seen very very
Speaker 5: large increases in their deposits and they were faces this question,
Speaker 5: what do we do with all of this money? And
Speaker 5: they basically did the wrong thing with all of that money.
Speaker 5: They had to do something with it. What they did
Speaker 5: was the wrong thing. And when that money then flowed out,
Speaker 5: and we can talk about the reasons why it flowed out,
Speaker 5: which are not the same from banked bank. The reasons
Speaker 5: for the visual public are not the same as the
Speaker 5: reasons of Silicon Value bank. But when that money flowed out,
Speaker 5: then that was existentially damaging for them, and they wound
Speaker 5: up having to close down and cost the insurance five
Speaker 5: billions of dollars in The shareholders would get wiped out,
Speaker 5: and the executives would get fired and all of this
Speaker 5: kind of stuff. Right, So what we have is weirdly
Speaker 5: a banking crisis caused by too much money in a
Speaker 5: weird sense, these huge money flows that we haven't really
Speaker 5: seen before in the banking sector. And this is an
Speaker 5: example of this new not normal that I'm talking about,
Speaker 5: which is just weird things happening, and they're happening all
Speaker 5: over the place, and they're happening more frequently, and they
Speaker 5: can be very profound and very important.
Speaker 2: So let's talk about that.
Speaker 1: So the most recent bank explained to us what just
Speaker 1: recently happened with the bank where they too were bought
Speaker 1: at the last minute.
Speaker 5: So the most recent bank to fail was called First
Speaker 5: Republic Bank, and that was another bank failure. The shareholders
Speaker 5: were wiped out, the bondholders were wiped out, even the
Speaker 5: insurance fund took a thirteen billion dollar loss. And the
Speaker 5: operations of that bank, let's say, were taken over by
Speaker 5: JP Morgan Chase. And that was a standard bank failure playbook.
Speaker 5: And it was similar to what happened with Silicon Valley
Speaker 5: Bank in that it was ultimately caused by a whole
Speaker 5: bunch of deposits leaving the bank. Where the difference arises
Speaker 5: is that it wasn't a fearful bank run like we
Speaker 5: saw with Silicon Valley Bank.
Speaker 1: Right, So it wasn't David Zachs on Twitter telling people
Speaker 1: to get all their money out correct.
Speaker 2: Yes, that I.
Speaker 1: By the way, I really enjoyed tech bros on Twitter
Speaker 1: causing bank runs.
Speaker 2: That's one of my favorite.
Speaker 5: Right. So this wasn't a bank run in that sense. Right.
Speaker 5: This wasn't people saying I need to get my money
Speaker 5: out of the bank otherwise I'm going to lose it,
Speaker 5: and it's like first to the exits. This was more
Speaker 5: of what I call a greedy bank run. That people
Speaker 5: had a bunch of money at First Republic, and First
Speaker 5: Republic's business model was always weirdly a kind of rich
Speaker 5: people don't care that much about money business model. The
Speaker 5: rich people would just keep a whole bunch of money
Speaker 5: at First Republic and it wouldn't be a lot of
Speaker 5: interest on those checking accounts because you don't expect to
Speaker 5: get interest on your checking account, you get amazing service.
Speaker 5: And so people would just love the amazing service, and
Speaker 5: they'd have loyalty to their personal banker, and they would
Speaker 5: stay at the bank. And then they realized, I have,
Speaker 5: say a million dollars on deposit at First Republic, and
Speaker 5: instead of missing out on a quarter of a percent
Speaker 5: interest that I could be getting on that money if
Speaker 5: I had a checking account somewhere else, I'm now missing
Speaker 5: out on like or five percent interest that I could
Speaker 5: be getting if I had it in treasury bills or
Speaker 5: other savings accounts. And suddenly, like, instead of losing out
Speaker 5: on a couple thousand dollars a year, you're losing out
Speaker 5: on fifty thousand dollars a year. And that's even if
Speaker 5: you're a millionaire. Fifty thousand dollars a year seems like
Speaker 5: real money. And so people just started moving their money
Speaker 5: out to places which were a much more lucrative and
Speaker 5: paid them real interest and be safer because obviously, over
Speaker 5: two hundred and fifty thousand dollars, although everyone kind of
Speaker 5: knew that the money was safe, you didn't know, no,
Speaker 5: I wasn't absolutely guaranteed by the government, and so you're like,
Speaker 5: given the choice between something that isn't rock solid safe
Speaker 5: and is paying zero percent versus something that is rock
Speaker 5: solace safe and is paying like four and a half percent,
Speaker 5: I'll take the latter. And so the money just bled
Speaker 5: out over the course of the second half of March mainly,
Speaker 5: and then First Republic was in a real pickle because
Speaker 5: it had made all of these loans with that money,
Speaker 5: and those borrowers didn't need to pay the money back.
Speaker 5: So where are they going to find the money?
Speaker 1: So explain to me what the book is about, sort
Speaker 1: of this new economy.
Speaker 5: So, yeah, the book is I call it the Phoenix Economy.
Speaker 5: That basically what happened in March twenty twenty was that
Speaker 5: the entire economy just ground to a hole. Everything stopped.
Speaker 5: You remember this. We all remember it, although we don't
Speaker 5: remember it that vividly because it feels like almost like
Speaker 5: this weird dream fugue state that we went to. I mean,
Speaker 5: we were here in New York, so we remember the sirens.
Speaker 5: We remember, And what happened was a huge number of
Speaker 5: things just broke. Time broke, like our conception of time
Speaker 5: just broke. The global supply chains broke. You couldn't get
Speaker 5: toilet paper or baby formula. Our conception that like we
Speaker 5: can all agree on scientific facts broke because we didn't
Speaker 5: actually know what the scientific facts were. We entered this
Speaker 5: realm of incredible uncertainty where we didn't really know what
Speaker 5: the virus was or how it worked, and people started
Speaker 5: leaching their groceries and no one really knew anything, and
Speaker 5: it was very uncomfortable because we've been in this Google
Speaker 5: world where anything you wanted to know, you could just
Speaker 5: look it up and it would be there. And now
Speaker 5: we were in a world where facts changed and scientific
Speaker 5: consensus changed, and that was really weird, and people found
Speaker 5: it difficult to keep up with that. So everything broke
Speaker 5: and we wound up having to recreate a new economy
Speaker 5: that was profoundly different and that had been changed by
Speaker 5: the experience of the pandemic and also a couple of
Speaker 5: years later, the experience of a major war in Europe,
Speaker 5: which was almost as traumatic, and so between those two things,
Speaker 5: what we've created is a very different world. Has changed
Speaker 5: the way we live, it's changed the way we think,
Speaker 5: and it has massively increased the probability of unexpected events
Speaker 5: and the importance of being sort of nimble rather than
Speaker 5: sticking to your guns.
Speaker 2: So give me one way in which that's happened.
Speaker 5: So think about the way the commercial real estate, like
Speaker 5: offices are half empty and office buildings are plunging in
Speaker 5: value at at the same time as residential real estate
Speaker 5: is not right. We've got these very high mortgage rates,
Speaker 5: but housebreakers aren't coming down very much. Houses are extremely
Speaker 5: unaffordable right now. And the reason for that is basically
Speaker 5: that we've had this massive shift of workspace from offices
Speaker 5: into homes that all of us working from our homes now,
Speaker 5: not necessarily all of the time, but a lot of
Speaker 5: us are working from our homes some of the time.
Speaker 5: And that has increased demand for residential square footage by
Speaker 5: a substantial amount. And so even if you've got these
Speaker 5: sort of right related headwinds like high mortgage rates, a
Speaker 5: sheer demand for real estate. For residential real estate has
Speaker 5: gone up. The number of square feet that any given
Speaker 5: person is going to want has gone up. In fact,
Speaker 5: what they want is a room with a door and
Speaker 5: a window that they can use to work in and
Speaker 5: be kind of on their own and unmolested. And that's
Speaker 5: called the bedroom. And you know in New York how
Speaker 5: much it costs to upgrade from like a two bedroom
Speaker 5: to a three bedroom or one bedroom to a two
Speaker 5: bedroom that could be half a million dollars or more
Speaker 5: right there. And so the demand for bedrooms has gone up,
Speaker 5: and we just don't have enough bedrooms to go around,
Speaker 5: and that's created this sort of supply and demanding balance
Speaker 5: which we're seeing across the real estate market and is
Speaker 5: not going to go away anytime soon.
Speaker 1: So one of the things that like a hot topic
Speaker 1: of debate is are we in recession?
Speaker 5: So one of the most fascinating data sets that I've
Speaker 5: been following for the past couple of years is this
Speaker 5: YUGA poll where they asked that exact question, are we
Speaker 5: in a recession right now? And basically, if you go
Speaker 5: back all the way to roughly mid twenty twenty one
Speaker 5: when they started asking this question, the answer has been yes.
Speaker 5: According to the public. The public has been consistently convinced
Speaker 5: that we are in a recession for over two years
Speaker 5: now or roughly two years now, and they've been wrong
Speaker 5: every single time.
Speaker 2: The public.
Speaker 5: So yeah, the public is very pessimistic.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it was good to say that. It's pretty stupid, yeah,
Speaker 2: but so go on.
Speaker 5: So, yeah, we definitely wear in a recession, very briefly
Speaker 5: for maybe you call it six weeks in spring of
Speaker 5: twenty twenty. Yeah, and then we bounced back aggressively. But again, like,
Speaker 5: this is one of those areas where you have to
Speaker 5: realize how hard it is for normal people, for everyone
Speaker 5: really to update their priors and change their minds. Right,
Speaker 5: things got really, really bad in April of twenty twenty.
Speaker 5: We had massive employment. Everyone lost their job. No one
Speaker 5: knew where the next paycheck or rent check was going
Speaker 5: to come from, and it just felt so terrible that
Speaker 5: when things really bounced back super aggressively and fast and successfully,
Speaker 5: it took a lot of people a lot of time
Speaker 5: to realize that was happening. And some people like they
Speaker 5: never realized that at all, and they were convinced that
Speaker 5: this terrible economy that we had for six weeks was
Speaker 5: ongoing for years. It really wasn't. They were convinced that
Speaker 5: inequality was going up when it was going down. They
Speaker 5: were convinced that like the rich were getting richer while
Speaker 5: the poor were getting poorer, and in fact it was
Speaker 5: the other way round. The poor were getting richer faster
Speaker 5: than the rich were.
Speaker 2: Well, it's very sad, but it's good. It's a good
Speaker 2: thing to happen.
Speaker 5: Actually, I mean, we really did have reduced inequality in
Speaker 5: this country, which is fantastic, right.
Speaker 2: And then it ended, just like the child tax credit.
Speaker 5: Well, I mean the child tax credit ended, but we
Speaker 5: still have in immensely low unemployment. We have a healthy
Speaker 5: labor market. We have one point six job openings for
Speaker 5: every job seeker. The main thing that people look at
Speaker 5: when they look at the health of the economy as
Speaker 5: the GDP growth, which is nice and positive. Like things
Speaker 5: are basically taking along, right, and so yeah, like at
Speaker 5: some point there will always be a recession. But do
Speaker 5: I think we're in a recession right now?
Speaker 6: No?
Speaker 5: We have unemployment at three and a half percent, Like,
Speaker 5: what kind of a recession is that? Like, we've never
Speaker 5: had a recession with unemployment there though, So let me
Speaker 5: ask you another question.
Speaker 1: We clearly have a very tight labor market. One of
Speaker 1: the problems is that companies can't find people to work, right,
Speaker 1: they can't. Now, instead of fixing our immigration crisis or
Speaker 1: offering people more money, a lot of companies have started
Speaker 1: employing children. And I mean, I'm sure you've read the statistics,
Speaker 1: and I don't think we really have a clear picture
Speaker 1: of what the scale is. And maybe small and maybe big,
Speaker 1: it may be medium, but it's certainly happening in big
Speaker 1: enough numbers so that we're seeing Republicans stay leaders changing
Speaker 1: You saw in Arkansas. They're changing the law because they're
Speaker 1: worried about these companies getting fined, or maybe they're just
Speaker 1: changing the law because they love having children working in factories.
Speaker 1: But whatever it is, it's happening, and I don't think
Speaker 1: any of us really know the scale of which, so
Speaker 1: let me ask you, I mean, what do you think
Speaker 1: about this? I mean, what is the moral responsibility here?
Speaker 1: And remember, these are children who are able to come
Speaker 1: across the border because it is slightly less hard for
Speaker 1: children to come across the border, so they come across
Speaker 1: the border and then they go and work in roofing
Speaker 1: factories or cheeto factories and they have no one and
Speaker 1: they're really as young as ten, So just talk to
Speaker 1: me about that.
Speaker 5: So, yeah, there was recently headlines about two ten year
Speaker 5: olds who were being put to work in the McDonald's
Speaker 5: until like two o'clock in the morning, who are like
Speaker 5: pretty obviously that the kids of the owner who was
Speaker 5: like looking after the kids while they were at work
Speaker 5: and like just putting into work. But yeah, it's a
Speaker 5: really bad thing. And we have law that ban very
Speaker 5: specific forms of child labor for a reason, and we have,
Speaker 5: as you rightly say, reluctance in many states to really
Speaker 5: aggressively enforce those laws. We also have a sort of
Speaker 5: boomerash nostalgia for the paper round in the teenage income
Speaker 5: generating huck Finn type stories that people love to tell,
Speaker 5: And there is this kind of feeling that the slacker
Speaker 5: TikTok generation could benefit from having to do a proper
Speaker 5: day's work now and again, and that is feeding into
Speaker 5: it too, right.
Speaker 2: But I think that that is a mentality.
Speaker 1: I don't think that most of the kids who are
Speaker 1: working in these jobs are those kids. I think most
Speaker 1: of these kids are kids coming from South America who
Speaker 1: are trying to feed their like starving families. It's hard
Speaker 1: to know because we haven't seen reporting.
Speaker 5: Yeah, yeah, there's not something where you can get statistics, right, Well,
Speaker 5: I mean there is no agency. There is no government
Speaker 5: agency like going around employers and saying how many immigrant
Speaker 5: children are you employing? So we don't know, and we
Speaker 5: don't know the degree to which that constitutes like a
Speaker 5: majority or a minority of all child labor in the country.
Speaker 5: We do know you're absolutely right on some level that
Speaker 5: there is just this insatiable demand for labor. What is
Speaker 5: often called low skilled labor or unskilled labor been, in fact,
Speaker 5: in a lot of situations quite skilled. And we have
Speaker 5: seen wages go up. There was very very few Americans
Speaker 5: are still earning the federal minimum wage. That fifteen dollars
Speaker 5: is the new seven dollars in terms of how much
Speaker 5: people get paid at the bottom end of the wage scale.
Speaker 5: There are some people who get paid less than that,
Speaker 5: but not a lot.
Speaker 1: But my question is, how do you solve this? How
Speaker 1: do you solve for a tight, tight labor market?
Speaker 5: Well, I mean, you're absolutely right that the first thing
Speaker 5: you can do is massively increase immigration, right, I mean,
Speaker 5: that's no grainer, and it's one that both political parties
Speaker 5: seem to be extremely reluctant to embrace. There used to
Speaker 5: be a time when the George W. Bush Republican Party
Speaker 5: was all in favor of more immigration, right right, right now,
Speaker 5: it seems like even the Democrats don't want it.
Speaker 1: Well, I mean, again, I don't want to defend because
Speaker 1: I do think there's a sense in which Democrats are
Speaker 1: afraid that Republicans will use it. I mean, Republicans have
Speaker 1: made immigration such a toxic issue that they have made
Speaker 1: it so that any kind of I mean, I don't
Speaker 1: think that Democrats are right on this. I think that
Speaker 1: they should, but I mean it does dovetail with this.
Speaker 1: We got to do two seconds on this debt ceiling.
Speaker 1: So we have all this money we've spent. Now Republicans
Speaker 1: are trying to figure out whether or not they should
Speaker 1: crash the American economy.
Speaker 5: Discuss right, So, the dead ceiling is the single dumbest
Speaker 5: thing in American politics, and it really does have a
Speaker 5: lot of competition, but it is inconceivably done like no
Speaker 5: other country would be so stupid as to have such
Speaker 5: a thing. Congress has mandated a whole bunch of spending.
Speaker 5: We have to spend that money by law, and so
Speaker 5: if you're going to spend it, like, you have to
Speaker 5: find that money somewhere. So what you do is you
Speaker 5: go out and borrow it. We're perfectly capable of doing that,
Speaker 5: except for this weird debt ceiling thing comes along and
Speaker 5: prevents the government from borrowing unless it's raised. The thing
Speaker 5: that astonishes me is that it's almost impossible to find
Speaker 5: sitting elected politicians who will say that obvious, which is
Speaker 5: the debt ceiling should not exist. It should be abolished.
Speaker 6: Right.
Speaker 5: This is a clear and obvious truth that every single
Speaker 5: halfways in touching person understands. And yet there's a sort
Speaker 5: of convention on both sides of the aisle that, like
Speaker 5: the debt ceiling is meaningful and should continue to exist.
Speaker 5: Joe Biden has come out quite recently and made noises
Speaker 5: to that effect. Whenever anyone says should we abolish the
Speaker 5: debt ceiling, the sitting president, whoever that is, always says no.
Speaker 5: And I don't understand that at all. So there are
Speaker 5: a bunch of sort of tricksterish solutions to this problem.
Speaker 5: Platinum coins and premium bonds and various.
Speaker 2: Slaves discharge petitions.
Speaker 5: And or the just the simple expedient of Treasury just
Speaker 5: going ahead and borrowing the money anyway and saying that
Speaker 5: it would actually be unconstitutional to default on the debt. Therefore,
Speaker 5: we have a legal obligation to ignore the debt ceiling,
Speaker 5: but a constitutional obligation to ignore the debt ceiling, and
Speaker 5: to just borrow the money anyway. But no politician wants
Speaker 5: to do any of these things. All of the politicians
Speaker 5: want to do this sort of weird brinkmanship thing that
Speaker 5: happens every so often. And so the base case scenario
Speaker 5: is that we're going to go to all of this
Speaker 5: brinkmanship and eventually there's going to be some kind of
Speaker 5: a deal and the bill will get pasted at the
Speaker 5: very last minute, and there will be a whole bunch
Speaker 5: of nervousness and everyone else in the world will look
Speaker 5: at the United States and go like, why are you
Speaker 5: being so crazy?
Speaker 1: Thank you, FELX, Please come back anytime.
Speaker 2: Hi.
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Speaker 1: Mike pod Hortzer is a political strategist and former director
Speaker 1: of the AFLCIO.
Speaker 2: Welcome to Fast Politics, Mike, Thank you. It's good to
Speaker 2: be here. So you are here to talk about unions.
Speaker 1: Explain to us a little bit about your union bona
Speaker 1: fides if you don't mind.
Speaker 6: Sure. I've woroked in the labor movement for about the
Speaker 6: last thirty years and was political director of the afl
Speaker 6: CIO for about ten of those, and have really been
Speaker 6: doing politics since the seventies.
Speaker 1: It seems like we are both in a great place
Speaker 1: for unions and a bad place for unions.
Speaker 2: Can we discuss sure?
Speaker 6: I think that, as I think you're probably alluding to.
Speaker 6: In terms of public opinion polls, unions have not been
Speaker 6: this popular in a half century.
Speaker 2: Right. On the other.
Speaker 6: Hand, we're in a period of time where corporations are
Speaker 6: still relentlessly making it difficult for working people to actually
Speaker 6: be in a union, and that has always been the problem.
Speaker 6: There's a way in which you know, people who are
Speaker 6: less familiar thing that if you want to be in
Speaker 6: a union, it's like joining ARP or something. But in fact,
Speaker 6: corporations do everything they can to prevent the people who
Speaker 6: work for them to form a union, and then even
Speaker 6: if they do, they often drag their feet and resist
Speaker 6: signing contracts. And so there's On the one side, I
Speaker 6: think something very refreshing, which is that more and more
Speaker 6: people understand the importance of collective action in this current
Speaker 6: democratic crisis. But on the other hand, we have not
Speaker 6: really much change in the balance of power between working
Speaker 6: people and corporations to form unions. And it's ominous that
Speaker 6: right now the Supreme Court is considering one case that
Speaker 6: would greatly hurt people's ability to act collectively, the Glacier case.
Speaker 2: And this is a court that has.
Speaker 6: Already done a number of important decisions like Jannis to
Speaker 6: make it more difficult to bring in to survive. So say,
Speaker 6: people very much understand that coming out of this neoliberal,
Speaker 6: individualistic era that the only way we can have the
Speaker 6: kind of society we want is by being able to
Speaker 6: act collectively. And at the same time, all the forces
Speaker 6: that would lose are have a lot of institutional levers
Speaker 6: to keep that at day.
Speaker 1: So talk to me about how if Biden wants to
Speaker 1: be the most union president, he would be able to
Speaker 1: sort of do that and change that narrative.
Speaker 6: I think that being the most union president since Franklin
Speaker 6: Roosevelt is not very high bar. Part of the reason
Speaker 6: why unions are in the position they're in is because
Speaker 6: first Carter, then Clinton, and then Obama never made protecting
Speaker 6: working people's right stack collectively a major priority and viewed
Speaker 6: what we now know was catastrophic things like trade agreements
Speaker 6: would devastate working people. So I think that what Biden's
Speaker 6: done already is far beyond that, and also he comes
Speaker 6: to it with a perspective that doesn't see which is
Speaker 6: really pretty refreshing. Is really the first president since the
Speaker 6: mid twentieth century that sees people in union as being
Speaker 6: a positive for the economy, not a part of the
Speaker 6: democratic coalition of interests?
Speaker 1: Right, So, sort of what could Democrats do to strengthen
Speaker 1: youunions that they're not doing well.
Speaker 6: I think one thing that we saw that was as
Speaker 6: a really good example was what we just saw in
Speaker 6: Michigan where Governor Whittmer and the Democrats there reversed the
Speaker 6: right to work in the state.
Speaker 1: Can you explain to us a little bit about how
Speaker 1: that happened and how they did that and start with
Speaker 1: sort of what the history right to work laws are
Speaker 1: and how they were able to do that.
Speaker 6: Sure during the New Deal. The first law to provide
Speaker 6: working people with government protected collective bargaining rights was past
Speaker 6: the Wagonaract, and that is where the explosion of union
Speaker 6: membership first happened. And the basic idea for people who
Speaker 6: are listening who have not been in a union is
Speaker 6: that if you have the benefit of a union contract,
Speaker 6: then you pay dues.
Speaker 3: And one of the real.
Speaker 6: Ironies of history is that during the nineteen thirties when
Speaker 6: the Wagonarak passed, Southern Democrats were for it because they
Speaker 6: were very hostile to northern capitalists and saw all the
Speaker 6: industrial agitation as something that would undermine them, and so
Speaker 6: strengthening unions seemed like a good idea to them. But
Speaker 6: of course we're talking about the segregationist wing of the
Speaker 6: Democratic Party. Then by the late thirties, unions were in
Speaker 6: the South trying to organize multi racial unions, which of
Speaker 6: course was devastating to those segregationists, and so they did
Speaker 6: a one eighty allied with the Northern Republicans to pass
Speaker 6: a bill called the Tariff Kaffed Hartley Act in the
Speaker 6: mid nineteen forties, which gave state governments the opportunity to
Speaker 6: pass what is very misleadingly called right to work legislation,
Speaker 6: which means that if you are in a union, you
Speaker 6: don't have to paid dues. And pretty much at that point,
Speaker 6: all those segregation estates passed right to work lass because
Speaker 6: the last thing they wanted was the emergence of a
Speaker 6: multi racial working class with power in that region, and
Speaker 6: they've been effective at achieving that. What happened after the
Speaker 6: twenty ten election is that in states like Wisconsin in Michigan,
Speaker 6: when these extreme MAGA governors like Walker and Snyder came in,
Speaker 6: they understood that it was essential for future political success
Speaker 6: to take out the labor movement, and so they passed
Speaker 6: right to work in those states. Now, in both of
Speaker 6: those states there was really no recourse because, as you know,
Speaker 6: they also did extreme gerrymandering, so that even though those
Speaker 6: states were voting about fifty to fifty, those Republicans in
Speaker 6: the legislature had substantial majorities in Michigan. And this just
Speaker 6: shows like what happens when you shine democracy on all this.
Speaker 6: As you know, an initiative busted up themandering with an
Speaker 6: independent commission. The twenty twenty two election then meant that
Speaker 6: if you get half the votes to get half the
Speaker 6: seats with Whitmer, they all agreed have to undo right
Speaker 6: to work, and you got that. Of course, it's still
Speaker 6: the case in Wisconsin because of how severely jerrymander it is.
Speaker 6: And the other thing that I think is really important
Speaker 6: for people to understand, because it's not necessarily intuitive to
Speaker 6: people who think about unions as just something that other
Speaker 6: people should have the right to belong to. It's really
Speaker 6: an essential foundation of democracy. If it is not a
Speaker 6: coincidence that the reach that the red states are overwhelming
Speaker 6: the right to work and that the blue states are
Speaker 6: entirely not right to work. Other than Nevada, there's not
Speaker 6: a state legislature in the country with a democratic majority
Speaker 6: that is right to work.
Speaker 1: Right, because right to work is really just about crushing unions.
Speaker 6: Crushing unions, and I think important for our listeners to
Speaker 6: understand it's not just crushing the institution of unions. It's
Speaker 6: crushing the opportunity for working people to take collective action. Right,
Speaker 6: That's where the connection with democracy comes in.
Speaker 1: Right, So, really, these right to work states are anti democratic.
Speaker 6: Absolutely, but it's all of a piece right that these
Speaker 6: states from the founding of the country had a very
Speaker 6: white Christian supremacist perspective. That first was the Slave States
Speaker 6: and the Confedteracy and seceded, and then Jim Crow and
Speaker 6: now this right, it's all of a piece with a
Speaker 6: view that the government is to ensure compliance with a
Speaker 6: known theocratic code, not to be the way people govern themselves.
Speaker 2: Right. For sure, WGA right now is striking. I mean,
Speaker 2: I am not part of a union.
Speaker 1: Because where I work is not unionized, But what do
Speaker 1: you think the WGA?
Speaker 2: I mean, what are your takes on that.
Speaker 6: I think that what we're seeing with WGA is in
Speaker 6: fact an illustration of an aspect of democracy that is
Speaker 6: almost always out of view, right, which is that we
Speaker 6: are all whether we're in a union or not, at
Speaker 6: a juncture where things like AI and other issues are
Speaker 6: creating uncertainty about the future. And what unions in general,
Speaker 6: and what WGA in particular are able to do is
Speaker 6: instead of sort of as individual have opinions, get together,
Speaker 6: figure out what collectively we think the best work arrangements
Speaker 6: are going forward and negotiate for them. And I think
Speaker 6: that's that's the essence of it. Is that and this
Speaker 6: is where it's kind of ironic, is that the way
Speaker 6: in which the power of people acting collectively is overlooked, right,
Speaker 6: so that you have a lot of people, for example,
Speaker 6: wanting to pass legislation to redistribute income because of gross inequality.
Speaker 6: Even conservative economists think just for union members, not the
Speaker 6: ripple effect or society is an extra one hundred and
Speaker 6: fifty billion dollars or more to working people other than
Speaker 6: Medicaid Medicare. There's no government program right now that redistributes
Speaker 6: that much money, not even snap. There are big issues
Speaker 6: out there, like trying to pass legislation to curtail corporations
Speaker 6: surveilling you at work. That's actually the case. We're working
Speaker 6: people can act collectively and of nature, their contracts protected them.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 6: It's a system that's been working for a century, and
Speaker 6: it also takes the people who are part of those
Speaker 6: negotiations and makes them better citizens. There are studies that
Speaker 6: show that being in a union makes people less racially resentful.
Speaker 2: They're being treated better too.
Speaker 6: Right, they're being treated but also because the sort of
Speaker 6: the way in which bosses the buy people over you know,
Speaker 6: race or used for waste wedges. When you're in an
Speaker 6: environment where you all have to sign the same contract,
Speaker 6: there's no getting ahead because you're white or because you're
Speaker 6: a male. Then you start looking at what you want
Speaker 6: in your contract a little differently.
Speaker 1: Right, Right, that's a good point. I mean, what do
Speaker 1: you see as the future for unions right now?
Speaker 3: I think that's really hard to say.
Speaker 6: I think that along with unions, we're all, you know,
Speaker 6: waiting for the next doesn't choose to drop from the
Speaker 6: Supreme Court. On one side, I think we can look
Speaker 6: at what's happening at Starbucks and Amazon and elsewhere, seeing
Speaker 6: that young people are really beginning to understand and be
Speaker 6: committed to acting collectively to get a better deal at work.
Speaker 6: But on the other hand, they're like, you know, all
Speaker 6: bets off on what the Supreme Court's going to do.
Speaker 2: Don't you just assume they'll do whatever's worse for the people?
Speaker 6: Yeah, but there's like different degrees of worst, right, you know,
Speaker 6: we're just meeting now. But definitely on the yeah, things
Speaker 6: will get worse side of things, there probably is a
Speaker 6: limit to what they can do, at least in one bite.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: What I've been really impressed with the Supreme Court is
Speaker 1: just how they've had They've really not cared at all. Right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: remember John Roberts did a lot of sleazy stuff, but
Speaker 1: he did it in a way so that people wouldn't
Speaker 1: be so up sad, you know, and they wouldn't think
Speaker 1: that the Supreme Court was so political.
Speaker 2: But now that's all out the window.
Speaker 6: Right, And I'm glad you're bringing the Supreme Court in
Speaker 6: more because I think some people are trying to recognize this,
Speaker 6: but there's a federal society majority on the court. Right,
Speaker 6: this is the Court has done many bad things in
Speaker 6: our nation's history, some unforgiven, but this was like an
Speaker 6: active hijacking.
Speaker 3: Right. The six justices.
Speaker 6: Were nominated because they swore allegiance to an organized set
Speaker 6: of principles that were funded by oligarchs and supported by
Speaker 6: the Christian right. Like, there's nothing mysterious about this. They
Speaker 6: were sent They are on the court not to decide cases,
Speaker 6: but to choose cases that allowed them to essentially legislate.
Speaker 6: And I think the thing that sort of took all
Speaker 6: constraints off of them was the twenty ten election, because remember,
Speaker 6: after two thousand and eight, it looked plausible that Democrats
Speaker 6: might have a sixty vote majority, and that as it
Speaker 6: has been the case up until that point in American history,
Speaker 6: Congress could overrule the most outrageous non constitutional judgments of
Speaker 6: the Court. But after the twenty ten election, it became
Speaker 6: clear that Congress was not a problem. Couldn't possibly hould
Speaker 6: them accountable for anything. And so if you kind of
Speaker 6: turn off what you learned on civics and high school,
Speaker 6: you realize that the most functioning legislative body in the
Speaker 6: country right now is the Supreme Court. They are actually
Speaker 6: not just deciding cases. They're deciding who can give to campaigns,
Speaker 6: They're deciding who can vote. There are all of these
Speaker 6: things that we used to do democratically through votes and elections.
Speaker 6: They're just doing it's because they were put there to
Speaker 6: do it, and it's because their backers know they couldn't
Speaker 6: accomplish it through any kind of democratic process.
Speaker 2: Thank you so much. I hope you'll come back.
Speaker 6: Sure, thank you.
Speaker 2: No Thick, Jesse Cannon.
Speaker 5: Miley Jung Fast.
Speaker 2: So there's this ABC News poll that seems little.
Speaker 1: Sus I mean, this is the thing about these polls.
Speaker 1: I feel like we have a poll. Sometimes it's a
Speaker 1: good poll, sometimes it's a bad poll. We then have
Speaker 1: to be subjected to an entire week long news cycle
Speaker 1: on said poll.
Speaker 2: So let's talk about this poll.
Speaker 1: This is the most recent New York Post ABC poll
Speaker 1: out this morning. It shows Biden's approval rating down to
Speaker 1: thirty six and it shows him losing a matchup against
Speaker 1: Trump by six points. And in this piece in Playbook,
Speaker 1: it says, well, is this question. Is this poll simply
Speaker 1: an outlier? And there are some people from the Washington
Speaker 1: Post who are pretty seasoned, like Dan Balls, who said,
Speaker 1: as in fact, they think it is an outlie our poll.
Speaker 1: So now we are going to be subjected to an
Speaker 1: entire news cycle of is Biden unelectable? And here's the
Speaker 1: thing we have learned from these last the last midterm,
Speaker 1: and the twenty twenty election, and the twenty eighteen election,
Speaker 1: and by the way, even the twenty sixteen election, is
Speaker 1: that polls are often not accurate. And so maybe this
Speaker 1: poll is very accurate, but there's a really good chance
Speaker 1: that it's not. And the idea that we're going to
Speaker 1: be subjected to an entire change of thinking because of
Speaker 1: this one stupid poll is our moment of fuckery. And
Speaker 1: it gets a hearty, hearty moment of fuckery. That's it
Speaker 1: for this episode of Fast