2/15/23 CounterPoints: Bernie Social Security, Pompeo JFK Files and Snowden, BBC Raided for Modi Doc, Texas Woke Tax, Gretchen Whitmer Ford Plant, Cost of Thriving, Ohio Derailment Coverup

to Counterpoints with our new intro music. Emily, what'd you think of that? I loved it. It was pumping me up. But I think there's some people who are going to have completely mixed emotions about this. On the one hand, the thing that made Counterpoints unique is that we had this incredibly jarring, silent opening and now you get to get it pumped up like a regular morning show. We can still nix it, go back to that. So, Emily, are joining us from Wisconsin? Is that right? Where are you?

I'm in Puerto Rico, so about as far from Wisconsin and as is possible. The first vacation I've taken in years, but I had to be here for Counterpoints. Joining us on your vacation since you're not in the studio, you don't know that we're actually starting with something different than what we talked about. We have breaking news. Just got alerted from the New York Times that they are trying to pierce the attorney client privilege and go after one of Trump's attorneys in the document case to try to

get him to try to get him to testify. This is in the classified documents case that they that they still have going against Trump. You might have seen that alerted on your phone just now, but your what's your reaction to this? Do you think that there's still momentum behind this case, given the fact that they're finding classified information at every former president, former vice president, former senator's house who seems to have left office in the last

twenty years. No, it's a good question because I think the momentum is the legal momentum is going to be different from the question of whether there's sort of a public momentum. Like the court of legal affairs is very different than the court of public opinion. The court of legal opinion versus the court of public opinion is a

huge distinction. And to the extent that they also started looking for these documents and Joe Biden's different residents and the think tank, and then they went through Mike Pence's office and his residence. That was all motivated by the Court of public opinion. It was really just like, hey, we need to see what's going on in case we end up, you know, we end up in a really untenable situation. And in fact, they did find themselves in

an untenable situation. Ryan, the other question I have for you because I'm curious what you think about that same question, but also with the news today about the news in the last couple of days about what's happening in the case in Georgia and Fulton County where the prosecutor was, as we can covered a couple of weeks ago, wants to keep the grand jury testimony and the grand jury report basically under wraps until they're ready to release it.

And we think we expect that she is going to indict Donald Trump, right, and all of this just to me just takes way too long. Like what is everybody waiting for? Like, if you have the goods on somebody, just move on. And this this thing where you're waiting Merrek Garland taking what two years to decide to move and then at the last minute he punts it over to a special prosecutor, taking two years down on Georgie.

I understand it takes a long time to interview witnesses, to collect information to move forward, but you're right, I mean, it does seem like this is heating up, you know, just as we're kind of entering into the Republican Republican

nomination contest. And I think the problem for Trump here is that if you're looking at this from thirty thousand feet away and you're not following this very closely, it does look like everybody's finding classified information, and maybe even Tho Georgia things seems to kind of lump in there with it. But if you get into the details, Trump was the one. Trump was the only one of all of these people who kind of was actively monkeying around

with people who were trying to get back the information. Now, when he unclassified the documents, right, he unclassified them all in his mind, Right, it's by declare bankruptcy. Exactly, declared bankruptcy.

Again with Biden and Pence, they you know, their lawyers found it and they immediately kind of reach out to the National Security Archives or they reach out to the Department of Justice say hey, we found these classified information with the other It's like boxes are getting moved around, there's there's you know, mar A Lago is just a den of spies, which isn't exactly Trump's fault, but it's going you know, it's going to attract a whole bunch

of foreign intelligence agencies who were going to try to penetrate that that type of situation. So, you know, for him to have just classified documents just kind of lying around or as trophies to kind of show off, puts him in a different category than Trump. Than the Georgia thing. That's going to be wild, because that really is going back to something real, like his attempt to mess with

the election in Georgia. What's your read on the Georgia prosecutor, Yeah, but to your first question about the momentum, we have learned that Joe Biden had apparently classified documents we don't know how classified, we don't know what they are about in the garage next to his corvette, in a house that Hunter Biden was living apparently and had access to. And so when Hunter Biden has engaged in really high level foreign lobbying where he's trading on his name, and

there's documents there it does whether or not. I think there are substantive reasons for concern and both the Trump and the Biden case, because presumably there are intelligence assets of foreign countries both in mar A Lago and around Hunter Biden, maybe even around Mike Pence. So there is a real substantive question. We still don't know the real nature of many of these documents. I think really does take some of the momentum away from this particular pursuit

of Donald Trump. Now the Georgia one, this is the most serious, I think legal threat to Trump that I have seen in the last several years. I don't know about you, but to me, this is like, this is the one that actually carries weight. And so if it gets sort of tick, if it gets sort of tacked on to the tiki taky ones, I don't know that that's super helpful for the folks in Fulton County, Georgia. Yeah. No, it's it's going to get exciting. We're gonna we're gonna

keep watching that. I think what they ought to do just declassify all of the documents and then let let everybody just decide who had the worst documents. And if it's the nuclear codes, redact the nuclear codes and also change your nuclear codes like that. You know best practices on nuclear codes. When you have a new administration, you do new nuclear codes. Right, that's pretty reasonable. Nor we

can agree on that. Yeah, So moving moving on to Social Security, which which I think actually represents a wedge that kind of points right at the most probably the most important kind of realignment going on in politics over the last twenty or thirty years, and that's the kind of class realignment or de alignment going on inside the two parties, with social Security working as a spotlight shining right on the strange situation that we're that we're finding us.

And we can get more into that in a moment. But Bernie Sanders, we can put up this. This a one. So Bernie Sanders is out with his new bill to expand and strengthen Social Security. He expands and strengthen is by basically raising taxes on the rich. He lifts the cap on payroll taxes for people making more than two

hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year. They don't get higher Social Security benefits, but they're going to pay more in payroll tax people at the bottom are going to see a ten to fifteen percent increase in their SOLI security benefits. And the actuary says that this would solidify the program for the next seventy five years, and they use a seventy five year window. And so you've heard a lot from Republicans saying that they want to strengthen

Social Security, warning about the insolvency problem. Basically too fomism here on counterpoint exactly, Basically, there's two ways to do it. You can bring more tax money in or you can reduce benefits. And so now Bernie Sanders has put his cards on the table. He's like, all right, here's my idea. Let's raise taxes on the ridge to fund it. So how are Republicans going to respond to this, because now if they say strengthen, it's like, oh, so you support

Bernie Sanders' plan. Oh, if you don't support Bernie Center's plan, then you do support benefit cuts at least down the road. Right, there's a guy on the right, I think he's at the Manhattan Institute, Brian Riedl, who does a lot of these calculations from the conservative perspective, and even he concedes he has said this is in the hof Post article, that the seventy five year mark or at least decades,

actually is a step towards for Social Security. He does, however, raise a really good point, which is that you run out of tax the rich proposals to then fund the gap with Medicare, which is a very very serious problem without implementing dramatic tax hikes on the middle class or cutting and so the math is still really really tough if you combine the problem that we have with both

Social Security and Medicare. And Brian Reedl has looked at some of these numbers and one of the most interesting things is that the average American is coming out on top in terms of what they put into Social Security and Medicare and what they get out. But what's even more interesting is to see how many benefits are going back to very wealthy Americans. We're talking about upper middle

class and upper class people. That there are a lot of people getting benefits in the Restructuring might be another way to look at this, but that doesn't preclude tax hikes. It certainly doesn't preclude tax hikes on the ridge. But it is interesting to think that what we can do with social Security. If we tax the rich basically at that level, then you leave Medicare Medicare without much to

do in terms of increasing taxes. From that point, I think when it comes to the wealthy getting Social Security, I think for everybody who makes more than four hundred thousand, who made more than four hundred thousand dollars over their career a year, if they want their solid security checks, they should have to go down to a Social Security office and stand in line every month, and also maybe even pee in a cup, you know, do all the degrading things that they that they make poor working class

people do to get their benefits. That way, if somebody really wants their Social Security benefits that they paid into, hey you can have them. Here's you know, here's the address of the office. You got to physically go down there and get it every month. But more seriously, what they could do is just kind of raise taxes a little bit more on the rich. So that way, Okay, yeah, you're getting it, you're but there's a progressively higher tax rate on you. So we're just basically taxing it back.

You can have it, and we're taking it right back. But so Mike rounds center, Mike Rounds was on. I guess I think it was Fox. We'll find that out in a second one of these cable networks talking about Social Security. Let's roll a two. Here. He's pointing specifically to the plan that your colleague, Senator Rick Scott, Republican of Florida released when he was leading the Senate GOP's campaign arm which says, just to quote, all federal legislation sunsets in five years, if a law is worth keeping,

Congress can pass it again unquote. Do you support that plan? I kind of look at social Security the way I would at the Department of Defense and our defense spending. We're never going to not fund defense, but at the same time, every single year we look at how we can make it better. And I think it's about time that we start talking about social Security and making it better.

We've got eleven years before we actually see cuts start to happen to people that are on Social Security, and I think it'd be very responsible for us to do everything we can to make those funding programs now and the plans right now, so that we don't run out of money in Social Security. Okay, that was obviously not Fox. The next clip we have is Fox Business. But what

what was your what was your reaction to that? Because all of these Republicans are getting hit with this Rick Scott thing, like, hey man, you do you agree with this guy who wants to sunset sold security and medicare over five years and reupp and then you have somebody like Mike Browns who says, yeah, we should keep we should keep looking at it. That Democrats seeing that are like, thank you, We're just gonna hammer you with this. What was your reaction to it? The White House was giddy

when Rick Scott put out that plan. I mean it was palpably giddy in Washington that the Democrats at DNC in the White House was just tap dancing that day because they knew this was their midterm weapon. And Mitch McConnell was furious. And for all my problems with Mitch McConnell, he's absolutely right to continue, you know, throwing the blame over to Rick Scott. Now, that plan, by the way, had a lot of really really good stuff in it, but this one thing that was buried in it. Basically

it wasn't a huge aspect of that plan. It was just killer And I was involved in a lot of conversations. I remember talking to Republicans, some high level Republicans even back in the spring, who were just furious that Scott had sort of gone rogue and put out this plan

that included that note in it. And the reason you keep hearing Scott and Round's talk like that, honestly, is because there is no answer unless you do to the point, we just had tax the rich at a crazy high rate, and then you're still left with either Social Security or Medicare. Like the math just doesn't add up. But they love to talk about it, and they don't want to seek any options that involve taxation. And on the other hand, nobody wants to seek any options that involve cuts. So

there's no restructuring plan that fits the bill. And that's why I think people like Mitch McConnell are like, just shut up about it. Now. You can interpret that one way, which is they're going to say one thing publicly and do the other thing that debt ceiling negotiations come. I think a lot of people are right to have that skepticism. But I will say the mood among Republicans in Washington was basically furious with Rick Scott that that got into

the plan. It feels like it could be the Republican version of defund the police, where you really only had like one or two Democrats, and you'd say, Corey Busher say,

did one interviewer he says defund the police. But in general it's you know, they're marching with people who support defund the police, or they're saying we ought to reduce funding from the police and move it over to social services, and then Republicans just you know, hit them over the head with it, you know, for multiple election cycles in a row, saying that you are for defund the police.

Democrats the party of defund the police. I would suspect Democrats are just going to do the reverse to Republicans with this over time. That's a perfect parallel because if Republicans really believed that they needed to do entitlement reform, like they desperately had this Paul Ryan commitment to entitlement reform, it would have been a priority for them in seventeen.

But Republicans are politicians just like Democrats, and politicians are categorically cowards because they want to continue being re elected, which means they don't want to touch entitlements. They might want to talk about it at the Chamber of Commerce meetings, but they don't want to actually do it, except for a few sort of deficit hawkish nerdy types that love love doing the math and et cetera. Still think the tea Party era was all about the Debton deficit, which

it never really was. Sager likes to make that point. It's a good one that the tea Party was sort of more cultural than really a movement to cut the deficit. But all that is to say, I think that defend the police parallels a really really apt one, and that's why you just see some real true believers that floated every now and then. But the real seriousness about making those cuts. They're too cowardly to do it even if they wanted to, and I don't suspect that they actually

really want to. And I want to play this clip of Buddy Carter because it's interesting to see how a kind of rank and file house Republican is talking about this. Also want to play the clip because I love the kind of jerkstore insult that he comes up at the very beginning of this. Let's roll it through and remember it took him about a week after the State of the Union to come up with this put downs. Let's

roll a three here. The supposedly State of the Union address that Tuesday night, it was more of a state of confusion address. I mean Senator Biden wanted to suspend the Social Security and Medicaid Medicare, and now he's claiming that Republicans want to end it. No, it's ridiculous. We have always said we want to preserve it, we want to stabilize it, we want to save it. That's what we want to do. Now he can continue to ignore it if he wants to do, but I'm going to

tell you it's got to have attention. We've got to do something about this. We've got to address this situation. Otherwise it's not going to be there. And that's why Republicans are trying to do our best to save this program, to preserve it so that it'll be there for generations to come. It's not a state of confusion. Yes, we're going to stabilize, secure strengthen like he just was whipping

everything out. Yeah, but I think the problem for Republicans to tell me if you agree with this, is that if voters hear Republicans say that they want to save solid security. They want to strengthen so or whatever they want to do with Social Security. They get nervous, like I don't think voters want Republicans talking about Social Security period. No. No, Because voters are smart. They understand that those are euphemisms. They're not dumb, and Republicans when they talk like that,

treat voters as though they are dumb. And just to be clear, I do think like Corey Bush and defund the police or whomever else, there are true believers in the Republican Conference and in the Senate that absolutely do want to cut these programs. They do want to do that, but the party as a whole, even if they did want to do it as a whole, they want to get re elected more than they want to make those cuts. I'm not saying that it's because they're all, you know,

morally upstanding people who want to protect benefits. I think it's because they're coward So even if they believed it needed to happen, wouldn't have the political guts to do it. From your lips to God's ears, let's hope. Let's move on to this great interview that John Stossel did that went under the radar with Mike Pompeo rumored twenty twenty four presidential candidate for CIA Director and Secretary of State under President Trump. Fascinating and wide ranging interview in which

he really got pressed on several things. But we wanted to look at a couple JFK and Edward Snowden. Let's roll the first clip from that. Why'd you fight to keep the JFK file secret? Because I was trying to keep Americans safe? And by the way, don't paint with too broad a brush. Ninety nine points six percent of the JFK files are public today. But it was sixty

years ago, John, Not everything was sixty years ago. I don't want to spend a lot of time walking through this, but suffice it to say, the definition of a document covered by this statute that you're referring to, it's a little bit wonky, but suffice it to say, if Congress holds a hearing tomorrow on the Kennedy assassination, the documents generated tomorrow will be part of those files. Those would be tomorrow, they'd be sixty seconds old, not sixty years old.

And last thing I'll say is there are things that happened sixty years ago that are still important to keep in the bolt. There are lots of things that happen that that long ago that still are appropriate not to release. Think of names and addresses and families. And by the way, there's also no value in them. These don't hold the dark secrets that everybody wants to just hold up as the bogum. And I saw the UFO files too. We've got bigger problems in America, got lots of bigger problems

just because something is kept secret. Why not not go to the darkest corners. But it's a lot of fun. I'm happy to go there with you if you'd like. I had a chance to see not all of those documents but most of them. The news value of them is grossly overrated, and the desire to keep them secret, the motivation, the rationale for keeping them secret is wholly justified.

So yeah, the content this of course to Tucker. Carlson recently said on his show that he invited Mike Pompeo on to talk about why he had made the decision to not release these documents, and Carlson also said that he spoke with somebody who had direct access to those documents and that that person said it indicated that the CIA itself was involved in a conspiracy to assassinateing Kennedy.

So that's Carlson's reporting. Carlson said Mike Pompeo, who never turns down an opportunity to come on to his show, declined the opportunity. He did agree to do an interview with John Stossel. Good for John Stossel for pressing him. Should we take Mike Pompeyo's word that there's nothing to see here? And you know this better than I do. But what he's talking about, that this sixty year thing

is absolute nonsense of Congress brig a Hole. The hearing tomorrow that it would be you know, in the JFK of files is sort of hilarious, and I think he almost knew it when he was saying it was funny, which is why he added that second answer, which is that you know, he goes on to say in the interview, potentially there are human sources that are still alive that might be compromised by it, and that I think is his real contention, that if there are people who are

still alive that might be implicated by potentially releasing the percentage of documents which is small but obviously important because they haven't been released despite the timeline, that these confidential human sources might be the problem. And Ryan, you mentioned the Tucker thing, and this is a great time to

bring up a theory. I know both you and I are interested in that a legal scholar, and the name escapes me at the moment floated, which is that, potentially, is Donald Trump Tucker Carlson's source who would have access both to Tucker and to those documents? Is it Donald Trump himself that told Tucker Carlson the CIA was involved

in this assassination. And then you can when you sort of fill in that blank, if that's the case, that the remaining JFK files sort of definitively prove that link, Mike Pompeo can say, maybe to himself and to the country in a vague way, that you know, he still needs to keep American safe and that the news value is low potentially because everybody already knows about the JFK files,

the JFK assassination's relationship to the CIA. So you can sort of see the intellectual gymnastics that might go into a rationalization like that. Yeah, And if you go back and look at the syntax of the quote that the person gave to Tucker Carlson, this person that you know, had a direct access to these files. He said. The quote was something like, it's all fake. It's it's not the country that we thought that we thought it was.

And once, when you think about the different quotes that than Carlson reads on air, and you think about how Trump speaks and thinks, you're like, oh, that's funny. That actually might be Trump might be his source. I don't know if that doesn't necessarily inspire me with more confidence than less, like I know, but it does maybe want

to see the documents, like, Okay, what are these? And Pompeo's argument to me isn't serious because there are there are such things as redactions, like if there is an eighty year old who was undercover in Mexico City in nineteen sixty and you know when they were twenty years old, then you can redact that name or you can they and they have redacted enormous amounts of the files that have that they have released so far. And so if if that's really what it is, then then just go

then just go ahead and release it. Let but let let's let's play the Edward Snowden clip where he presses him on these questions and gets some rather kind of stark answers from Pompeo. Edward Snowden, the man who told the world about the federal government sweeping top secret domestic spying program, is on the move. After Snowden fled America, Pompeo said, we've had the trader, Edward Snowden steel that information.

He should be brought back from Russian given due process, and I think the proper outcome would be that he would be given a death sentence. He should be executed. He's a trader. Yes. What the NC doing every single day, it's ordinary course of business, is violating not only the laws as written, but likely the constitutions. What he told the American people about court said was illegal. Both of those thoughts can be held in one's head at the same time. So what should he have done. You can't

steal stuff, John, You can't steal American secrets. It's unacceptable, even even if your justification is noble. He put my friends at risk. He put your family members, or your cousin, or your friend who's serving in a submarine fleet somewhere in the world he put their lives at risk, and he did it by stealing American stuff, and that by definition is unlawful. And he did it in a way that he knew put their lives at risk. What's one example that no longer would threaten somebody, How does he

threaten somebody? Well, the information that he stole and then provided to the world, shared trying to figure out how to do it without being the same man that he is, shared patterns of American activity and our naval fleet. It's dangerous, John, that's not noble. That's not sharing something the government's doing. That's bad. And that wasn't his mission set. His mission ship was to be mischievous and undermine the United States of America, no mistake about it. Edward Snowden's intentions were

to weaken the United States of America and he did. Yeh, What was your reaction to that? So it's he also in the interview didn't know. When Stosselbrode brought up that there was a previous whistleblower, Pompeo said he hadn't heard that another person had attempted to blow the whistle by

talking to Republican staffers. By the way, Republican congressional staffers, intelligence staffers with this information and had ultimately been punished that actually a lot of people had been punished in the process of trying to blow the whistle on the NSA's Post nine eleven activities, And Pompeos basically said he wasn't familiar with the fact that that had happened. And so, if I'm in Edward Snowden's case, do I morally know whether or not he did the right thing? It's hard

for me to say. I think there's a real question there. But at the same time, Edward Snowden is clearly a victim of the impossibility that our government created surrounding blowing the whistle on the NSA. And the value I think it's pretty easy, are you. The value of what he revealed is outweighed the sort of cost benefit. The benefit of what he revealed is outweighed by the cost, and we continue, I think to learn more proving that's the case. Yeah,

I think that's exactly right now. And I also think that there's something revealing about his use of America and America's secrets, and it raises a question of what is the definition of America and for Pompeo, clearly what he means by America is the American government like that that the American government has sole custody of all of these secrets.

That whereas I think most people would think of America as we the people, that that there is, that that there is that there is a collective ownership of these things, and that that the people have a right to this information. Now that the government has a right to try to keep importance secrets, and it ought to do that to keep people safe. If it fails at doing that, it has remedies. It can fire those people, it cannot hire those people in the future, it can take away their

security clearances. But everyone in this country has a First Amendment right to speech. Whether you work for the government or not, you have a First Amendment right to speech. And all of us, as Americans, you know, have a right to know whether or not our government is breaking laws. And I think your point is a great one that Okay, let's say that Edward Soden had tried that route. Oh, we don't have to say, because we know that people have tried it in the past and they haven't haven't

gone anywhere. So you can't set up a situation where nobody can blow the whistle legally and then also say, well, that's that's your only avenue. Oh it doesn't work too bad. Whoops. Yep, no exactly. And just as we wrap up, I want to make a final comment. I think it's great that a former CIA director is actually running for president because that means you will be peppered with a lot of questions.

Good for John scoswel for asking those questions. And I look forward to hearing more people question my Pompeio on these issues. And coincidentally, the last CIA director to serve as president is thought to have possibly been involved with the very conspiracy about Pompeo does not want more documents to be to be released upon So yeah, another another CIA director And what I don't I don't. I can't imagine him. And the last question for you, I can't

imagine him as a credible Republican candidate. But what do I know? Could he be? You know, I think he's good on a huge issue, good from the perspective of a Republican voter on a huge issue for them, which is China. So that is a top priority for the average Republican voter, and Pompeo probably checks a lot of boxes. On that note, Niki Haley is obviously announcing her run for president today, someone who I don't think checks a lot of boxes on China and the economy and national

security in the same way Pompeo might. But two almost similar candidates in a way kind of hawkish pre Trump figures. So it'll be interesting to watch the racing wall. Well, moving to China and India, if we can put up this c one here. So, the Indian authorities have now rated the offices of the BBC in India in retaliation for the Modi the Modi documentary that we've that we've

talked about here. We previously talked about this documentary in the context of Twitter and YouTube both agreeing to take it down after demands made by the Indian government that they that they do so. This is a documentary that looks into Prime Minister Modis role in a brutal massacre back in I believe it was two thousand and two. It's a two part documentary and has been called propaganda and basically banned to be viewed in any of Some students UH tried tried to view it. Some were detained

by police. Others at other universities tried to view it were pelted with with stones. It's becoming not just a cultural moment in Indy but also a free speech touchdown in the country, but also relates uh to free speech debates here in the United States because Uh Elon musk did finally comment on Twitter's decision to comply with India's request to take to block any sharing of the BBC documentary, and he said, look, his comment was basically, look, I'm

running three companies. I don't have time to fix every problem. Uh that's going on with Twitter all over the world. You know, what do you what do you people want from me? And that was several weeks ago. Uh it

is it is still being banned. Twitter's offices actually were raided before Elon Musk uh purchased the company by Indian authorities because the the the pre Musk Twitter was actually pretty aggressive in rejecting a lot of these demands from the MOTI government, which led to a rate of their offices. So what was your reaction when you saw that that Indian stormtroopers are like moving in to a media organization's office. Well, yeah, And according to CNN, these were tax authorities that were

raiding the office and not letting employees in. And the first thing I thought about actually was a CNN headline that asked, this week, I mean, this is headlines that are happening concurrently, is the iPhones made in India era

about to begin? Look at that. And so again you have a situation very similar to what was happening in China in some very important ways, which is that companies like companies like Apple are about to entangle themselves very very deeply in another country where leadership I'm not talking about the people, but while people in the government shared different set of values about what that government should look like, and how that government should function, and what the relationship

between the people and the government should look like. So, for instance, in that article, you have a top minister in India saying that Apple wants to go for making five to seven percent of its products in India to twenty five percent of its products in India. This is a huge jump. Fox con wants to start doing more

business in India. Obviously, that's a huge iPhone manufacturer that has done most of its operations in China for a very long time, had huge problems We covered that here extensively just a couple of months ago, when it came to workers upset about the zero COVID policy. Tim Cook has recently said that India is hugely exciting. That's his direct quote. And there's also an interesting point in the CNN article which talks about how Samsung ended up already

moving shifting a lot of its operations. It's a lot of its manufacturing from China to India because of rising wages in China, the rising cost of labor in China, meaning here are some poor people we can exploit in another country to keep costs low for us. And so this dynamic is now emerging when it comes to India. The Wall Street Journal, this is their last element is sending, is reporting that more and more CEOs are about to

make trips back to China or already have. We're talking Volkswegen, Mercedes. We're talking about Albert Borola of Pfizer and Tim Cook of Apple flirting once again over in China, you know, with their benefactors in the Chinese business community and the the

Chinese government to the extent that those are separate. But this is going to pose a really difficult, I think question for Apple, and to see Tim Cook in particular, just diving right back into the deep end in a way that so reminds me almost eerily of the early days of our sort of China merger. There seems to be the same naivete. I don't know, it's not naivete, it's cynicism, I guess, Ryan, right, And you see the

same process unfold continuously. You know, the comp factories start in the kind of the north of the United States. As they unionize and costs grow there, labor costs grow there, they move down to the south where they have fewer unions. As those factories start to unionize, they move from there to Mexico and elsewhere in Central America. Then when when those costs get too expensive, then they move over to China.

Now that it's getting expensive in China, you know, they're they're moving from there over to Southeast Age and over over to India too. And I'm curious if you take that Indian number seriously, you know, we have to take the source with a grain of salt. This is a this is an Indian minister who is you know, who has an incentive to kind of you know, pomp up how much Apple is going to how much business Apple

is going to be doing in there. The ninety five percent of the manufacturing that gets done in China is done because the Chinese government, you know, subsidized these the development of these factories over the last twenty to thirty

years to a significant degree. So, you know, how quickly do we think that this could actually happen in or is this just or is this something of a bluff that they're that Tim Apple is my favorite name for that guy, that Tim Apple would be using uh against against China to try to just say, look, look, we do have leverage against you, because it looks India they're they're desperate for us, and we're investing heavily over there. Well,

a couple of things. That's a great question because on that point, one, if it's getting I mean, this is all about the bottom line for them. There's no sort of moral argument for China in the way that they were making you know, around WTO I think you know, they've they've really basically just given up on that. So at this point it's all about the bottom line. And if there are a lower wage costs in India, then I think that's extremely tempting especially if they start getting

showered with subsidies. And on top of that, if if India is taking back seat to the sort of geopolitical tensions with China, especially over time, one that we have this like sort of military conflict getting increasing or potential military conflict getting increasingly increasingly hot, then they have supply chain concerns that come along with another question about the bottom line and so the financial risks of continuing to do business in China versus what they might see as

a lack of financial risks in India. I think that would be enough to actually really start to shift some of this business. But on that point it is I shouldn't say naive. It is cynical again to make this bet on India, When to your point, Ryan, we're seeing tax tax authorities raid a media outlet over apparently apparently a documentary. You can see in similar ways how our idea of liberal democracy or classical liberalism is again going to clash in a way that might not necessarily be

a rising tide lifting all boats. And the Indian governments France was Look, if the PBC hasn't done anything wrong, they don't have to worry about these inspections by these financial authorities that it also reminded me of prohibition. If you remember who who was doing the like the bashing in the doors of all the of the saloons and

all the bootleggers, those were Treasury Department officials. So you know this, it's certainly not outside of the realm of possibility that you can have tax taxcoons that are that are knocking, that are knocking your door down. But let's let's turn now to a kind of fun story that that Bloomberg put out UH this week about uh ESG, the kind of protests against ESG done by Texas and Florida.

They crunched a bunch of their numbers. Essentially, what they found is that Florida and Texas, by refusing to work with major banks that embrace kind of ESG standards, now have much less demand for their for their their bond floats, and as a result, they're paying somewhere between you know, thirty five and fifty five basis points higher, which in the case of Texas accounted for about five hundred plus million dollars and probably something similar for Florida given the

roughly equal size of their economy. So in other words, for the exact to borrow the exact same amount of money. They're spending hundreds of millions of dollars more so that they don't have to work with these companies that they consider to be politically incorrect. The whole thing to me just hilarious. Christina was he named pushaw the Ronda Santis spokesperson.

She actually liked one of the responses to my tweet up there that said, look, that's just thirty five basis points is a fair price to pay to not have to deal with these woke banks, And she liked that.

So that's we're in this weird place where there's an acknowledgment that, Okay, this actually is costing the taxpayers of Florida more money, but from their perspective, it's it's worth it, and that the fiduciary responsibility to get the lowest to get the lowest interest rate on the loans is outweighed by the kind of the political necessity to push back against this. The trend of ESG what what what? What do you think is? It is? It is the price

worth it? I'm so glad we're talking about this article because I have a completely different perspective on it than you do. I thought it was just dripping with this classiest condescension for it was yeah, oh, it was amazing. Yeah, these like red state cultural conservatives who don't know what's in their own interests. They're too dumb to vote based on what's actually in their interests. You heard over and

over again. But in a sense, I think the tweet that Christina Peshaan liked, you would probably find a whole lot of Floridians, whether they are middle class, upper class, agreeing with that. I don't know about the low income bracket. I think that's probably a very different question. But I think you would go a lot of Floridians saying hell yes, it's the same sentiments you find with two other areas,

one restoring and second of all tariffs. There were the sort of corporate press was sitting in their air conditioning studios talking about how the soy tariffs, for instance, were just crushing soybean farmers in the Midwest and the ones that Trump had implemented, and then they would send, you know, some sweaty correspondent out to talk to farmers at the state fair, and the farmers would all be like, hell, yeah, we support the tariffs, it needs to happen, and you

get a similar sort of sentiment from a lot of people. When it comes to restoring there are mixed attitudes about that in the country. But hey, for instance, if it costs a little bit more to bring jobs back here to make things in America, would you prefer that, you get a lot of people saying yes. And it's just like the article, for instance, in Bloomberg sites that Larry Fink him else has said that ESG is a good thing,

as though that's supposed to be the persuasive argument. Now, if you go tell Floridians, if you explain to them the bullshit that Blackrock is pulling around the country and say, yeah, you're going to pay a little bit extra in taxes because we don't want Florida to be entangled with financially complicit with what Blackrock is doing. Man, I think you would get a pretty resounding sentiment. I think it's I think you got to respect Republicans for wielding power here.

Like if they really believe that this is a mission that is important to them and they're they're willing to then you know, admit that they're going to spend more money financing their debt in order to push back against it, you know, you do have to credit them. I and I appreciated Christina acknowledging that that that that is what's going on. That could because there would be a tendency to say this is, you know, there's other reasons that

the that you're paying more financing. Although Bloomberg's analysis is pretty rock solid and I agree with you, I think that on this, on this sense, I think that from the from the left, I think people would say, like, yes, if it helps do something about runaway climate change, then we would be willing to pay a little bit more. If it brings manufacturing back to the United States, we'd be willing to pay a little bit More's if it supports unionized labor, we'd be willing to pay a little

bit more. And you know, if it supports a higher wage, because you often see people say, well, if you pay you know, fifteen dollars an hour wage, then you know your happy meal is going to cost another fifteen cents, And a lot of liberals say, fine, I would rather pay that fifteen cents and have you know a living wage, Well, fifteen isn't a living wage anymore. And a lot of a lot of areas, but the point is the same.

So what's nice about it from my perspective is that it has moved us out of of free mark a dogma. Now we're debating, you know how as a democratic society we ought to be moving resources around, and I think that's what we ought to do rather than just pretending that we're all just going to be hands off and you know, wherever the chips fall is is the fairest way for it to shake out. No, you're really you're really right about that, And that's an important point that

it actually is. I think both a political benefit and obviously a moral one for politicians like Rondo Santis and Greg Abbatt to be honest that this is a cost, that this is a hidden tax, to borrow the exact phrase from the Bloomberg article that said, I think it's

also really important. The climate stuff is a little bit different, but like the the S and the G part of that of ESG, it's really important to acknowledge that in many cases, if not most, it is a corporate pr smoke screen so that they continue to can continue to act like Blackrock does. Chevron has all of the e they will spend all day talking about the E and how good they are on the E. They will give

to charities that support the E, and it's nonsense. It's a way for them to cover their own asses because they're doing very bad things and they're doing them behind closed doors, so they try to bring good things into public.

Might it funnel some money into some good causes, sure, But if you look overall at many many of the people that are benefiting from ESG dollars, there are people that corporations are just using as human shields, as charitable shields to continue doing bad behavior because they, at the end of the day, are corporatists, they are capitalists. They're doing what they think is best for their bottom line, which is to be able to advertise how good they are on ESG. And it allows them to go to

cocktail parties with their heads held high without actually doing anything. So, I mean, it's a very The Bloomberg article was hilarious. I'll just leave it at that. Yeah, and we could put that Bloomberg article up that next element there. But yes, lately Fong at the intercept. If you google his reporting and ESG, you'll find a number of good stories that he's done some of them, exposing how private prison companies

will score super ESG scores. Uh. He interviewed one CEO whose lawyers told him, you know the fact that like your mother was half Asian American means that you can qualify as a minority and then and then your ESG score will go up x amount because now you can say that you're it's a minority run like company or something like that, like so and and the CEO himself was like, this is completely absurd, and so there to me that the there there is, there's an enormous amount

worth criticizing esg Over. I think that while wokeness is the thing that gets talked about as the as the kind of crux of this and that and that sells, I think a little bit better. I think it's actually the EU that that is the actual kind of power center where this debate is being being held. And if and if you and the Republicans sometimes and kind of right wing Democrats who are critical of it, they'll often very quickly go to this is going to hurt us.

When it comes to energy independence, You're like, okay, this is about fossil fuels, this is actually this is actually a fight over energy and oil and gas rather than what we were cloaking and we're trying to we're cloaking it in kind of culture war stuff, but it's actually a raw kind of money and power fight over the future of energy in America. That's that's my guess. How much of it do you think is actually about that

and it's just disguised as a cultural war issue. I think that's a good point, and that's it's actually an important point to the conversation we were just having, which is it gives these corporations an off ramp. They're bolstering the sort of necessary off ramp that they have when

it comes to oil and gas. Right. They know that they can't depend on oil and gas forever, so they can divert some of their resources with charitable sort of public relations smoke screens to building up infrastructure that they will later benefit from. Its actually sort of a genius little scheme that they have going on there, and they can you know, maybe it's beneficial. Maybe you disagree with me in some sense think that that'll go to a sort of net benefit. But there you know, again, these

are corporatests. They are doing it for their bottle line. Well, speaking of bottom lines, let's let's move to Michigan, which just announced that it was the winner of what a two point five billion dollar investment from Ford into a new battery plant in Marshall, Michigan, which it was basically right smack in the middle of the state, will create two five hundred direct jobs. The multiplier on that, they said was something like four. So you're talking about, you know,

ten thousand, ten thousand jobs supported in the area. Plus once you get to that, you're talking about building an entire kind of economic engine for an area. I think this is maybe thirty forty minutes. You may might know

this area better from Kalamazoo. What makes this entire fight so fascinating is that this was an investment that Ford had been kind of taking around the country to see what would what would be the best spot to plant it, and it made news because Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin withdrew Virginia and said, we don't want your money, calling it basically a front for the Chinese Communist Party. Crystal Ball

reported on this a couple of weeks ago. Let's run a little bit of her monologue on that governors go to great lengths in order to attract these types of jobs into their own states. But here Governor Youngkin has gone in the total opposite direction, and what at first blush might seem a surprising move. Here's the Washington Post quote.

Governor Glenn Youngkin said this week that he had rejected efforts by Ford Motor Company to consider locating an electric battery plant in Virginia over concerns that the automaker's partnership with China created a security risk. Quote. We felt that the right thing to do was to not recruit Ford as a front for China to America, Youngkin said Wednesday night to reporters after delivering his Day of the Conwell speech to the General Assembly. Emily, is there any way

to defend Glenn Younkin here? Or is this as bad as it looks? I have a couple of possibilities I think might be going on one. I don't know that this is true. It's a guest. I do wonder if he knew that it was going to Michigan and then made a statement about withdrawing to look tough on China as people are floating his name as a potential presidential contender and then what do you think about that? Yeah, we don't want your stupid factory anyway, get out here

exactly exactly right. It allows him to, yes, yes, to take a really bold stance. On the other hand, it's tough because I think the type of voter that he wants to appeal to and Virginia and its rural areas is very, very red. Actually, probably he doesn't want to get completely entangled in a company that is also entangled

with China. But I think Crystal and you are raising a really interesting point, which is Glenn Youngkin mister pe baron Patagonia vest wearing champion of the new rights, champion of the populist right. I mean, it's always been a very strange conception or a strange caricature of what Glen Younkin actually is because he did talk, so I think, capably about some cultural issues, especially education, when he was on the campaign trail, and he won in an upset

over Terry mccaulliffe. But then that slots him into this position of populist because he checks off some of the cultural boxes that he might not check off when it comes to economic issues. Because again we're talking about a guy who was a pe like magnet basically. So that's a real tension. He's from Carlisle Group, that's the PE firm that he was at, right, Yeah, it is, and I actually remember it just it reminds me of what we were talking about in the last segment. I haven't

reported this. A couple of years back. I think that Glenn Youngkin had signed a letter when he was at the head of the Carlisle Group diverting funds to BLF. So again, like you just see where this tension exists with Glenn Youngkin as sort of a populist champion and Glenn Youngkin as also a business champion, and Carlisle, while Youngkin was there, did enormous amounts of business with China.

So I would suspect that his advisors have been telling him, Okay, this is a huge vulnerability for you, and so this might be a way that he thinks he's gonna then, you know, push back against it. To me, it probably goes way too far because it's brutal for him that it's Ford. And you know, there are people in Michigan who are like, you're kicking Ford out for being a front for the Chinese Communist Party, Like if we can't have a Ford plant, then what plants can we have?

And also if you're not willing to have any manufacturing you know, in your state that has a linkage along the supply line with China, then you're basically not going to have any manufacturing Like that's that's basically what you got. Yeah, And that also makes me think potentially more about the theory that he sort of whether or not he actually

knew these were going to Michigan. Maybe he had a very strong suspicion that they were going to Michigan and use it as an opportunity then to signal on China. Because if he if he did do a lot of business with China at the Carlile Group, you'd think he would be friendly enough to take the jobs and then also take the you know, if he knows this is already a vulnerability for him, he would take the jobs, especially since it's Ford, and then you know, he can

continue to have positive ties with China. It's sort of a win win because again it's forward, it's not you know, we're not talking about a Chinese company. But to your if you're if you're just gonna grandstand over any company with any ties in the manufacturing supply chain at China. It's going to be impossible to have manufacturing jobs in Virginia right right, there's basically no company that you're gonna

be able to find that doesn't have some supply connection. Now, obviously a battery plan is going to be the most but if you're going to dislodge China from a monopolistic kind of control of that, you're going to have to first, you know, build up some some capacity. Like it's not you can't just flick a switch and instantly have a have a kind of self sustaining domestic clean clean energy industry when you've allowed China so far to basically lock down, uh,

pretty much a global monopoly on it. So uh, it does mean that, yeah, you just can't You basically just can't do anything if you're if you're a governor who doesn't want to be at all involved with China. It also reminded me of a lot of populists over hundreds of years have said the thing we need are term limits. And I get that because it's like this is how you get back at those career politicians. But guess what, because Virginia has a single term limit on its governorship.

As soon as that person gets there, they're no longer thinking about Virginia voters. They're thinking about where they're headed next. And so he's thinking more about Republican primary presidential voters probably than he is Virginia voters because he doesn't have to face them for reelection. And so folks out in southwest Virginia all of a sudden have no power over him, or have no sway. All right, Emily, what's your point today?

All right? Well, I want to talk about a Cost of Thriving Index, a really interesting project that was released on Monday or Tuesday by American Compass, a writ of center think tank that sort of seeks to shake off the old Republican economic orthodoxy, the sort of free market dogmatism, and propose some ideas that actually helped working class Americans, even if they make the Republican Party kind of uncomfortable, they do a lot of really great work, and I

think the Cost of Thriving Index is one example of that and well worth talking about. So instead of relying on simple inflation calculations to try to measure what has changed between earlier decades of the twentieth century and now one of those things that's been hard for people to kind of put their finger on. Instead of just using that simple inflation metric, they came up of with this cost of thriving index, which takes a ratio of nominal

costs to nominal wages. And so the cost of Thriving index uses a ratio of nominal costs to nominal wages instead of just relying on simple inflation. So you can see that the index then has gone up just an incredible amount since nineteen eighty five to twenty twenty two.

You have about eighteen thousand dollars and then a median weekly income of four hundred and forty three dollars that's for your twenty four year old full time worker versus your annual expenses of seventy five twenty twenty two, along with a weekly income of about twelve hundred dollars in twenty twenty two. So you can compare that to nineteen eighty five and look at the ratio, and the ratio

is fascinating to see how that has exploded. And I really like what American Compass puts in the survey that it released or this report that it released. It says this quote explains what economists cannot that with all of these technological innovations and advancements quote, something important has been lost.

So Ryan, I wanted to get your take on this ratio way of finding a metric to figure out kind of something economists have had a hard time putting their finger on what has changed for the average American and especially for the average American family where you have or you intend to have one kind of breadwinner, typically the man, so that you don't have these insane childcare costs, which is also more in line with people's preferences generally in polling.

Whether you agree with that or not, it's a hard thing that economists have had sort of nailing down. So what do you think about the ratio method? That's the only reasonable way you can do it, because I think that's how people experience it on a day to day basis. The only other thing I would try to add in

is the precarity of the situation. You know, back in the fifties and sixties and seven even through into the seventies, people had a sense that the life that they were living at that moment was still going to be the life that they were going to be living the next year, the year after the year after that, and also that life would get better for their kids and for their kids' kids, And so that enabled you to then eat some of the indignities, perhaps because you were trading it for some

sense of economic security going forward. Whereas now, as you're describing, people have fallen much further behind because the costs, particularly education, healthcare, childcare, like you said, have have ballooned and have and have not have outpaced wages, Whereas you know, food prices have stayed pretty steady. Like you know, when I was in college, you were paying the same at Wendy's that you're paying

now twenty years later. But you're absolutely not paying the same for college, you're not paying the same for healthcare,

you're not paying the same for housing, et cetera. And so on top of that, if you throw in the fact that you don't have any certainty that what your situation is now is going to be your situation a year from now, and you also have kind of the shredding of a social safety net, then that's then that adds an enormous amount of anxiety to it, because if you feel like, all right, there's some more precarity in

the job market. But at least I know if I fall, I'm going to be I'm going to be protected, I'm going to be able to bounce back. Then then you might feel a little more comfortable and maybe willing to take some risks. But if you don't feel that, then you're just going to have constant anxiety. Even if the numbers are matching up for you, even if you're making ends meet you, you're going to continue to be able to do that. And as that shows, you're you're certainly

not able to put anything away. And as housing prices you get out of control. The one access to real wealth creation for middle class people, which is people would buy a house when they're twenty five years old and be in good shape thirty years later as a result. And so Emily my question, you would be given this reality, you know what kind of policies and politics is the is the right willing to embrace to kind of do

something about this, to do something about these runaway costs. Well, that's why I wanted to talk about this particular index, because one of the things that the right debates sort of within itself is whether or not wages have actually stagnated and a lot of the problem is if you're just looking at the CPI versus wages, it's just hard

to put your finger on that. And so moving to this ratio formula is one of those things that can help put in very stark perspective to this sort of bespectacle the well paid expert class in Washington, DC, what the average American is experiencing and why there's malaise. Here are the numbers that can actually sort of put this into perspective as opposed to having these debates about CPI, which is not, to the point you just outlined, going to be the most helpful, because you have this mismatch

where prices for TVs have plummeted. I mean, it's insane how low TV prices have gone and other electronic goods and sort of things like that versus the skyrocketing prices

of healthcare and education. So relying on something that looks more like a ratio than that just basic calculation, I think, is one of those things that hopefully can help start the process of settling that debate on the right because if you still don't get it, you need to because your policy prescriptions will be way off if you don't yeah, I think it's important that our kind of our politics really start to measure these things, because you know, there's

that old saying, you can't fix you don't measure you. And the things that you measure, those are the things you're able to fix. And the more you keep things kind of out of the political conversation, you make them a political than they just soar. And so that's why I'm so grateful to Bernie Sanders in twenty fifteen for kind of bringing the cost of college into the political conversation, because it wasn't it wasn't really a political question before that.

In other words, it wasn't something that was contested in the political arena. It was just something that's people said, well, that's unfortunate. I guess we better, you know, maybe do a few tax credits here or there for middle class people to help them afford these now sixty thousand dollars a year, you know, costs for colleges out of state public college is costing fifty sixty thousand dollars. And it was it was Sanders coming in saying, no, no, this

this is a political question. This is a decision that we need to make democratically, and so at least at least it's on the table part of the conversation. And

the same for healthcare. I feel like we're not hit there yet with housing, that it's something that gets talked about in the press all the time, but it's not really something that you see a lot of politicians proposing things that might actually get done, you know, build back better, had you know, several hundred billion dollars going toward housing policy, but when it got you know, stripped down to becoming the Inflation Reduction Act, it was the first thing that

was just gone out of here. Yet yet it is so central to what is making life so difficult for ninety percent of people in this country. It's one of those things that like even the people in the top twenty percent, you know, are like it just are just

getting killed by it. No, you're right, And one thing that worries me, and maybe this why there aren't a lot of solutions proposed, because one of the things that worries me is you hit an impass here when you look at, for instance, the relationship between subsidies education and healthcare and the costs of both of those industries. Now, nobody's saying that has to be the case. But historically in the United States, we've seen, for instance, subsidies increase

the cost of education. We've seen subsidies in some ways increase the cost of healthcare. And so if we do

the same thing with housing. Not all of these proposals involve subsidies, to be sure, but that's another thing that like you and I might disagree in some cases on whether the subsidies are responsible for the hikes, and that makes it hard for policymakers to come to an agreement on or at least an agreement that isn't like cronyism like we've seen in the healthcare space specifically, so that if I was to do something that might put a dent in your optimism, that's what I would say. Well,

there you go. So I was listing. I was only looking down as I just got a call from our next guest, Matthew Weaver. We're going to check to see if he's ready. He is a union railroader in in Ohio.

He's the elected kind of elected legislative director for the for the Ohio kind of brotherhood up there, the BMWD, and he's also a member of the rank and file railroad Workers United which is a caucus that we've talked about here before, and so we're going to get Matthew Weaver on here to talk about the chemical disaster in East Palestine. In a moment, all right, to talk about

the ongoing disaster in East Palestine Ohio. We're joined now by Matthew Weaver, who is a twenty eight year railroader member of the bmwe D and he's also the elected legislative director in Ohio for the Union. Matthew, thank you so much for joining us. Good afternoon, Thank you for the opportunity to join you. I appreciate it. Yeah, you got it. And so, you know, one of the one of the things that I've seen being discussed in political

circles in relation to this disaster. I've seen a lot of people saying, look, this doesn't actually have anything to do with PSR, with precision Scheduled railroading. So you guys are out there just trying to shoehorn everything in to this issue that we've talked about a lot on this show, the same but it doesn't fit. The facts of the case just don't line up. But it has nothing to do with why there was this disaster. I wanted to

get it. From your perspective as a railroader, what do you think were some of the kind of general structural causes that led to a situation where something like this could happen. Well, it would be false for me to speculate on the real cause until the NTSB report comes out, But I can tell you from discussing with machinists and car shop workers that the inspections have been rushed. The two guys working four to five minutes per car to inspect a car for departure, now it's one guy ninety

seconds or less. So that's time involved in inspecting those axles, those journals, those bearings, and all the component components of the railcard. Now on the side of government, that's another big question. There's been a lot of sort of back and forth within Ohio about who might bear responsibility for lacks standards and then the fallout is another question entirely. What can you tell us about the government sort of oversight of the railways in Ohio and how that could

have potentially related to what we're seeing unfold and East Palasting. Well, I can discuss you know, many articles that we've seen about railroad lobbyists campaign finance, watching big money in this industry, skirt, try to skirt laws, limit laws, delay enforcement, and that's kind of the problem. The breaking set systems are Civil War era, you know, this is an old industry, but there are some improvements that can be made to avoid

things like this. Yeah, you know, let's talk talk a little bit about that, because it seems like there are kind of two ways that you could kind of from from an industry perspective, go about go about making it less likely that this is going to happen. One would be the one that you alluded to, which is allow inspect, allow you know, mechanics who are inspecting the trains more

time so that they can actually expect it. Because as there's been some reporting that this had something to do with a busted axle, you know, if you're underneath the train, you only have ninety seconds. You might not have enough time, you know, to spot the problem that is going to

lead to you know, an act and actual breaking. The second is the other thing you alluded to, better braking systems, and this you know, to to basically modernize the Civil War technologist post civil technology that we've been relying on. So what would it take to get us to a place where they're actually implementing these braking systems on on trains that are carrying these hazardous materials. It would take an investment in the infrastructure, I mean electronic braking. They

have the technology out there. They did improve tankers. The problem is is that would upset the shareholders in an industry with skyrocketing profits, profit margins that are you know, they're screening for to work for a fifty five percent operating ratio when you're talking food industry working at ninety you know. So it's all about profit over people, and we depend on the regulators to regulate ensure safety, and that's where I believe we're going to find a failure here.

You know, there were a lot of comparisons. I'm sure I'm sure you've seen people saying why does small town, Ohio look like Chernobyl in the past week or two. And I want to ask a question that maybe the answer we don't really want to know because it's frightening. But from your perspective, as somebody with a lot of insight into this just across the board, what other kinds of safety issues that are not being sort of adequately attended to either on the corporate side or on the

government side, exist in your mind? Are there potential criseses looming that sort of Again, is somebody with insight into this keep you up at night knowing the lapsed standards are out there? Well, I mean, from my perspective, from the maintenance wait perspective, I think it's for maintenance. You know, you don't put a band aid on broken leg. We

don't fix things till they break. Preventive maintenance often seems to be lacking because they even call us maintenance in the way then instead of maintenance of way, it's but this, this is not This is mechanical as far as I know, And it sounds like a bearing, a hot bearing, hot journal, a hot box detector caught but it was too late. I get the impression that this ran for twenty miles without those conditions. So perhaps we need more detectors. We

need to address these issues. Right, And you've been, as you said, a railroader for twenty eight years now, how how have you seen the industry change in that in that amount of time? Well, in other words, like what would what would what were inspections looking like before? What was maintenance looking like before? We've lost thirty percent of our manpower of rail labor in the in the last eight nine years. They're just not the numbers aren't there.

The manpower is not there to do the work they have. There's something going on with having conductors inspect the cars or inspect the connections with the hoses. I don't know all the details on that, and much of this is mechanical rather than engineering, and I work for the engineering department, And since we're talking to a national and international audience,

I want to ask just a pretty basic question. Is there anything you wish people understood about the industry that as it's come into the sort of front of our political discourse, our discourse in general, with the strike last year and now again with this insane story out of Ohio. Is there anything you wish people understood or you think

maybe they misunderstand about the industry. I believe that public doesn't understand how powerful the industry of what is, how the subsidies the railroad's got or building across the country, you know, and the power they have. You know. I tell applied for the Ohio House Transportation Committee about crossing safety and two man crew and there were seven lobbyists in the back of the room listening in on what I was having to say. It's a very powerful industry.

I was actually just going to ask you about that because as the as the legislative director for your union in Ohio, what is it like when you when you go to the state capitol? I mean, what are you what are you up against there? And how hard is it for you to get a hearing in the halls

of power in Ohio? It seems very difficult. We've been trying for multiple years to get a crossing safety bill in that simply adds and other on track equipment to the laws so that the public acknowledges that we have track equipment, we have inspectors, trucks, we have there's more than just trains on the tracks. And we failed at that in Ohio. I believe thirty one states have a

crossing safety bill for that purpose, but not Ohio. So it's very difficult because the money the railroads have it is tremendous and as you say, you can't just fix things when they're broken, right right, And we had had Devin Mant's, a railroader from North North Dakota on earlier and he was mentioning one of his He also does maintenance away and one of the things he does, he's driving basically a big pickup truck over the tracks looking for looking for flaws, kind of making sure that things

are are running so the train can move over smoothly. So is that the kind of crossing that you mean that you're that you're trying to make sure that as a as a pickup truck is driving along the tracks, that you're not going to get slammed by a big rig coming in the other direction. Yes. Often our trucks are on track. Equipment does not foul the main all the tracks, so the gates don't go down. I was putting a crane or a boom truck on the tracks until some years ago, and I had to jump up

on the high rail gear up. I'm the bumper because I was almost hit because somebody not paying attention. You know, the gates weren't down. I had the flashes on, but you know they it's a dangerous scenario at the crossings, and we have had people die in those instances. Yeah, absolutely, yeah, right, And what would be what's what do you hear when when you talk to lawmakers and say Hey, can you just add this, like, what is what is the railroad's pushback?

What is what is the lawmakers problem with? It seems to me that that should be the bare minimum, And in that circumstance, it is difficult for me to comprehend because it would save the railroad's liability as well because it puts more emphasis on public responsibility to acknowledge that there's more than trains on the tracks all. But it seems like the carriers are always pushing back against the unions.

This is a real safety issue. Well, and one last question from me is just in the last week or so, do you sense a different maybe sentiment arising among regulators and maybe even the companies as they reckon with the incredible destruction and problem, the scale of the problem that was caused in Ohio. Do you sense that maybe this is an opening for real change or do you sense maybe more of a cover up in motion or an attempt to just sort of paper it over, put a

giant bandit on it, and keep on moving. I think it's a very good opportunity to stripe while the iron's hot and get media attention. I've had a lot of interviews, we've talked to a lot of people railroad Workers United. Railroad Workers United dot org is probably how you got my contact in full. And they've had a media committee that's been out in droves and we have to keep the attention. I do know. A big issue on bargaining

was the attendance policy. And at least four unions in the last ten days have gotten sick days at CSX and that's a promising step forward. And there were no concessions in getting that. Yeah, And I think that's important for people to understand because when you wage a public fight and you raise national attention on an issue, even if you don't win the ultimate victory in Senate. In the Senate for instance, sometimes it puts so much pressure

that you end up winning anyway. So how how did you end up with with with those sick days through through UH through your railroad? Honestly, I give a lot of credit to the new CEO who came from Ford. I met him twice. On the second time I met him, I told him that I forgot to mention that now that he's the CEO, perhaps he can talk to other CEOs from the class on railroads and get us sick days. He said, you know, matt that's a good idea. I don't believe it will happen in this round of bargaining,

but I'll work on it. And he's leading by example. So you don't see me often giving credit to company officials, but I was, I appreciate that you know that we have paid sick days now, right, and going to do if they're not pressured, right, right, and so get Yeah, well, well, Matthew, I really appreciate you joining and be safe out there, thank you. And it's not the thing they're going to

do without attention. So I appreciate the media attention. You guys are really helping us get the word out there because the public doesn't know. No people thought we had sick days and we had zero until last week. Yeah, it's really crucial, it's really crucial. Thanks so much, Matthew. Thanks you guys. I appreciate the opportunity. Right. And so they continue to discover more and more, or they continue to announce more chemicals that that were on that train.

I announced the just just yesterday. Uh. The disaster continues uh to unfold. They actually published a list of of everything that was on that train. I noticed it seemed like half the train was malt liquor. There has not been any reporting yet on on what happened to the malt liquor that I assumed that that went up in that outrageous chemical chemical blast that I think you appropriately described as kind of looking like Chernobyl in the middle

of middle of Ohio. Emily, do you sense that there's any that this is a wake up call or do you you know, Pepe Pete Buda Judge was asked or appeared publicly recently and didn't even didn't even mention anything going on in uh in East Palestine. How many disasters are going to happen under Pete Buddha Judge's watch at the dot. I mean, seriously, it's just a never ending supply of disasters from America's transportation infrastructure under Pete Boodha

Judge's nose. So yeah, I don't know if there's any momentum when you look at the fact that that's what our management and it's not just Pete Booda Judge. He's representative of I think something much broader, which is this technocratic precision. The precision word is such an important part of this, this like precision technocracy that we've built as a country, and so it doesn't just require a shift,

it requires a paradigm shift. It doesn't just require momentum, it requires momentum to literally change the sort of structure of how we manage these things. And with that, I mean, I guess I don't know, maybe I would. I imagine you're in the same boat. I'm just I feel eternally pessimistic because to actually like really shift the paradigm is

such a different question. But when I ask Matthew that question about what sort of maybe keeps him up at night, I mean, that's the Chernobyl thing is like what it's really what I mean by that, I'm you know, the fact that all of a sudden you have Chernobyl like cloud hovering over small town, Ohio. That's exactly like we only hear about these things when they happen, right, We

don't know what's happening. Nobody can pay attention to the infrastructure, you know, minutia and every given problem every second of the day, and so we don't know what's sort of lurking in the shadows. But we know the infrastructure is failing. So God only knows truly what is to come if

we don't get our act together right. And it isn't like you said, only Pete boo to Judge, but it also is a peat Boota Judge has responsibility as Transportation Secretary for this, and he needs to be doing something like this. It's it's you're right, he has been He's been dealt a really difficult hand as Transportation secretary. But at the same time, crises like that are opportunities to show leadership and he just has simply decided not to

do that. And it's just it's utterly confounding because if you are as ambitious as he is, if you're eyeing the presidency, it seems like you would take these opportunities to start cracking some heads, cracking some railroad ceo heads, cracking some airline ceo heads. Instead, it just seems like it's just the mckinsiness is just so deeply kind of ingrained that he just can't see his way to that, and it's going to be to his political detriment. I

suspect I don't see how he recovers from this. And you know, it's not as if Pete Boota Judge's political career is even in the top ten of the most important things when it comes to these crises. But it is that is going to be some of the fallout, I think, And you know, he hasn't really shied away from media. We'ch sure tells me more about where his motivations really lie. So like he's been hiding from the media as these disasters unfold. I think he's happy to

go out there and talk about it. And that makes me think that he really wants a job where he can go out there and talk about things instead of or in lieu of perhaps really you know, doing things, except this one. He hasn't really had much to say about this one. But that's true. That's true with the strikes, all all the other ones. Yeah. Absolutely, but that's going to do That's gonna do it for this episode of Counterpoints, Emily,

thanks for beaming in from Puerto Rico very much. Appreciate that this time next week I will be in Mexico preparing to watch a couple of days of fish concerts. I will not be joining you from there. We'll have we'll get somebody else in the desk for you. Maybe people can suggest who they want in the in the comments section. I don't think we've I don't think we've roped anybody into it yet. But I will be thinking of you, guys, uh, I promise we'll be We'll be

thinking of you. Maybe we'll smoke a jay to be in solidarity with Ryan when he said that at the Fish concert. I would, I would, I would appreciate that, not breaking Americ going to do it in America. We'll get Sager to do this in your honor. There you go, excellent. All right, Well, we'll see everybody soon. H