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