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 Donald Trump won't release his medical records despite being the oldest presidential candidate ever. We have such a great show for you today. Democracy Defenders Pack Jim Messina stops by to talk to us about Vice
President Harris's path to election. Ben we'll talk to New York Times Peter S. Goodman about the impacts of the long Shortman deal and the looming dangers that continue with the supply chain. But first the news.
So, Molly Young Fast, if there's one thing that Trump campaign's been doing for God, it feels like all the way back to the Muslim Ben, they like crying about migrants and what they do this country. Actually, I think that happened when he came down the escalator.
Really, this should not be a surprise to anyone who has spent the last decade dealing with this guy. But the thing he's doing now, this hurricane really hit North Carolina, Florida, Georgia really badly, and so Trump has decided that he's going to lie about the FEMA money that we all know FEMA has gotten money that both Governor Kemp and Governor Cooper. Cooper's in North Carolina he's a Democrat. Camp
is in Georgia, he's a Republican. That both of them have said they have gotten really good money from the federal government. They're being taken care of. And so what does Donald Trump do. He makes up a lie that the disaster money is not available for the federal response. That's not true, and that it was given to migrants in the US here illegally. It's a lie. You should not be surprised by this lie. Trump repeated it again at a rally in Saginaw, Michigan, and he says that
the money's been stolen, the FEMA money. This is exactly what autocrats do. He wants his base to hate this other, to use an other, a group of people who are immigrants or in the case of my ancestors, Jews and other them, and use this very divisive language about them, and make his base furious and feel that they have to prevent these immigrants from coming to this country. You shouldn't be surprised. It's right out of the autocratic playbook.
Well, another page out of the autocratic playbook is doing wildly unpopular things and pretending you're not going to do them, which is what Donald Trump is losing it over right now. What are you seeing here?
Project twenty twenty five, which is this conservative think tanks agenda for the quote unquote next Trump administration, And we did a YouTube series about it which you can google, and in it we talk about these different plans, these different right wing thing tanks have and they are basically to flatten the federal government, make it tiny, and then use parts of the federal government as arms of the
Trump campaign. For example, Project twenty twenty five wants to make the DOJ the Department of Justice, part of Trump's campaign and let him do whatever he wants with it. Now that there's been some popularizing of what it is, people don't like it this plan because it's a lot
of really unpopular stuff. So Trump is furious and wants to distance himself, so he took to his failed social media site to say lion Kamala Harris, who refuses to do interviews or press conferences, though I saw her to a rally yesterday and is now losing in the polls, which is also not true because she's been winning in all the Polls continues to make a thing called Project twenty twenty five the central theme of her campaign advertising
and all Trump ranted on a post untruth social on Friday. Look, this is what he does, this is who he is. No one should be surprised. And now let's talk about the bibles.
Well, I have to say I actually did call this one. What had happened that somebody would end up passing out a lot of Trump Bibles? Because Trump is the new religion to a lot of these people. Sure enough, Oklahoma classrooms, they'll be getting Trump Bibles soon.
It looks like so Oklahoma is a state that has really become a testing ground for a lot of the Project twenty twenty five stuff. They are very Republican, very trumpy, very crazy. Superintendent Ryan Waters decided that they were going to buy Bibles for all the schools, which is total, totally not how any of this is supposed to go right, because they're supposed to be a separation of church and state. Bids open on Monday for a contractor to supply to
this Department of Education the fifty five thousand bibles. Guess what certain specifics the bibles must have. Bibles must contain the King James version, must contain both the Old and New Testament, must include copies of the Pledge of Allegiance, Declaration of Independence, US Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and must be bound in leather or leather like material. A salesman at Mardell Christian and Education search they carry two
nine hundred bibles. None fit the parameters. But you know what bible does fit the parameters?
Jesse, What with the mister Trumps.
I know you'll be shocked to hear this, but Lee Greenwood, who is Donald Trump's Remember Lee Greenwood, the singer who Donald Trump.
Loves, Yes, he loves playing those songs at the rally.
Lee Greenwood's God Bless the USA Bible endorsed by former President Donald Trump and commonly referred to as the Trump Bible. These bibles cost sixty dollars each online, and Trump receives fees for his endorsement. Those bibles fit the parameters perfectly. Dun, dun, dumb so mally.
One of the growing signs of dementia In dementia j Trump is that he keeps saying dead people endorsed him. He's done this repeatedly, but now he's just said somebody who's a large player in the world stage endorsed them, and they're denying it. What are you seeing here?
So Trump shared on his failed social media site that he had been endorsed by Jamie Diamond, the CEO of JP Morgan Chase, and Jamie Diamond responded, I don't know anything about it. Look, Trump realizes that a lot of people think he is a completely inappropriate candidate who will bring a lot of financial problems this country with his tariffs and his craziness. So he's having trouble getting endorsements
from normal, serious people. And since he's Trump, he just is making it up and pretty trumpy, I'll say so.
Speaking of truth social BALI, it appears after the stock is tanked that what happens a lot in Trump world is happening there, which is everybody's turning on each other. What are you seeing there?
So the COO left the company and now owes almost eight hundred thousand shares to an investor. Look, there's no way here's the COO left. Then we had a bunch of other people leave. The shares were when they made their debut and started trading publicly, they were seventy nine dollars and thirty eight cents a share. Now they're sixteen
dollars and twenty cents a share. This stock keeps going down because it doesn't the company doesn't make any money, and it's just a complete you know, it's it's like a should be a penny stock.
I think the funnest revelation in it, though, is that a lot of these people are leaving because former Congressman Devin Nunez is mismanaging the company. Who could have I ever seen that coming?
Right, well, Devin nun As. I think it's just the allegation of mismanagement at this moment, So we have to be clear about that because we don't want to get sued. But the allegations top executives exit the Trump Media Company amid allegations of the CEO's mismanagement and retaliation shock you Bush shocked to hear that working at Trump's social is about as bad as working in the Trump admin and neon as there is a He was the CEO of the company in twenty twenty one. Now there are these
whistleblower allegations about him. So they've enlisted a lawyer in the company. Some employees were notified. The lawyer has been pushed out. So there's a lot of drama happening here, and now the COO has left. This is just what you think of when you think of Trump running a company. I'm not very surprised, but I'm sure we'll hear more about this.
I'm personally shocked that Retali and Devin Noon as a manuseudo Twitter account about his color in the same sentence. I can't believe this.
Very very shocking.
We have even more tour dates for you. Did you know the Lincoln projects, Rick Willson have Fast Politics bleijug Faster are heading out on tour to bring you a night of laughs for our dark political landscape. Join us on August twenty sixth at San Francisco at the Swedish American Hall, or in la on August twenty seventh at the Regent Theater. Then we're headed to the Midwest and we'll be at the Vivarium in Milwaukee on the twenty first of September, and on the twenty second, we'll be
in Chicago at City Winery. Then we're going to hit the East coast. On September thirtieth, we'll be in Boston at Arts at the Armory on the first of October. We'll be in affiliates City Winery, and then DC on the second at the Miracle Theater. And today we just announced that we'll be in New York on the fourteenth of October at City Winery. If you need to laugh as we get through this election and hopefully never hear from a guy who lives in a golf club again,
we got you covered. Join us and our surprise guests to help you laugh instead of cry your way through this election season and give you the inside analysis of what's really going on right now. Buy your tickets now by heading to Politics as Unusual dot bio. That's Politics as Unusual dot bio.
Jim Messina is a former presidential campaign manager for Barack Obama and founder of the Democracy Defender's Pack. Welcome back to Fast Politics, Jim.
Thank you for having me. Molly, I missed you.
Oh I'm so glad you're here. We saw each other in Chicago for a minute, which was really fun. So talk to me about this pack you're doing and what it does and what it is.
So Malia, I know you and I like are similar ages and we grew up in a world where if you win an election day, you win the election. Yes, that's not no longer true in a Trump world. And you know what we have seen in the past two and a half months three months is a Trump campaign in the Trump ecosis to file one hundred lawsuits all over the battleground, try to stop early voting, trying to get RFK off the ballot in places after he got off, trying to get rid of voting locations, changing the rules
at the very last second in Georgia. And this will not be a surprise to anyone on the listening to this podcast. Lawyers are fucking expensive, Molly, and so we decided to build this super pac to basically fund the
legal war on all of these things. And so I'm doing it with Norviizen, the famous kind of campaign lawyer and thinker, former ambassador, and a bunch of other people, including the former Republican Lieutenant governor of Georgia, and a whole bunch of people who just want to see fair elections.
And we're really two things. We're going to fight these lawsuits between now on election day to make sure people have the right to vote, and then too, between election day and January whatever the day is that we're counting the electoral votes. Trump's campaign managers said, the election is not over an election day. We're going to fight all the way to January sixth. That's probably going to mean Supreme Court cases. It's going to mean them trying to
intimidate people and counting the votes. You see what they're doing in Georgia right now, which is trying to set up a paper trail to contest the election. Like, all of these things are happening, and we just can't think it's enough to win on election day.
Yeah, I mean, I think that's a really good point. And in fact, the RNC is largely no longer focused on voter turnout but instead focused on voter intimidation and having voter security day, which means filing these lawsuits.
Right, That's exactly right, Molly. And here's what the data says. The research shows that voters hate all this. And if you're thinking about like, oh, there's I see all these stories about how on you know, there could be protests on election day, could take forever to wait in line.
You know, the rn C, at im ally's point is saying, right now they're going to put collection observers in there, to contest whether people should be able to vote, not because they think they can actually stop them from voting, but they want to make it slower, right, They want the lines to get bigger so people will go away. And the truth is that works. Research shows that people
hate that stuff. And if they pull up and they see a line all the way down the block and they got two kids in the car, and they're like, fuck, I was just going to pop in and vote, and now it's going to take hours. I'm not going to do this right. And so it's why really voting is so important, but it's why, you know, contesting some of these intimidation tactics is absolutely so important. So for your listeners,
I'm not a lawyer. I'm just a campaign hack. So pairing me with a bunch of lawyers is a little funny, but the truth is, you know, you got to do both. You got to understand how to win a campaign and you've got to be super smart lawyers, and so we're putting together both.
Yeah, I think that's a really good point. And I also I wonder if you could speak to what's happening in Georgia with a handcount right now.
Yeah, I mean, look, So the the Georgia Elections Board is changing the rules literally sixty days before the election or now thirty five days for the election, to say that you have to hand count on election night every single vout to figure out how many there are that were paper ballots, so that way they can have an evidence trail. Now, why is that a big deal? That's a big deal because we know it'll take forever to
figure out who's going to win. What Trump's going to do is exactly what he did last time, which is, say I won the election, stop counting because we don't want all these votes counted. And you saw this in some of the testimony that Jack Smith just just put out there, that Trump said it didn't matter whether he won or not. He was just can declare that he
won his polls were closed. And so they're setting this up to be able to try to contest every vote in Georgia in a place where it's really really hard and going to be really really close. And when you run sixty six thousand simulations of the election, which I do every night because I'm a loser.
You're not alone. We do that. We all do this.
Yes, go on, Yes, you realize that if we don't carry Pennsylvania, you have to replace it in the most likely place to replace it is Georgia. And you know this is what she believes because they've been there a bunch. They started their campaign doing a bus tour down in Georgia, and so it's just absolutely crucial to have a backup plan, and Georgia is that plan. And Republicans know this, and that's why they're changing the rules of the very last second to make it more difficult.
Explain what her most likely path is. And also if you could explain to us maybe what you think her play is and how do you think it's working.
Yeah, okay, so great questions. We could talk about this for hours, because it's pretty much the only thing I care about in the world.
Me too.
When you look at how to get to two hundred and seventy electoral boats, which you know I spent eight years of my life doing for Barack Obama, you realize right now now there's only seven battleground states in America, which is depressing, and I think we all agree that sucks, but it's true. And there Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Nevada, North Carolina, Arizona, and Georgia.
She has more than he did though.
Right, Yep, yep, yep, it's true. But when you look at those seven states, they're all not created equal. And then we say that is because the Midwestern three what we call the Blue Wall, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. Democrats have carried those states only six out of the last seven presidential elections. Means that you know, they've always been close, Like you and I have spent our entire adult life waiting for Pennsylvania to come in, right, but those are
states where we usually win. Then you can trast that with Nevada five out of the last seven, North Carolina one out of the last seven, and Arizona two. And so those what we call the sun Belt states are
just harder bets, right. And when you run the sixty six thousand simulations of the election right now, the tipping point state in seventy percent of those is Pennsylvania, and then in another twenty percent is Wisconsin, and then you kind of get to Georgia and North Carolina, and again they're not all created equal because Pennsylvania is so big. If you replace it with Georgia, you also have to win Nevada, right, and so look at the real clear
politics averages. All of these are within the margin of error. But you know, North Carolina Trump currently leads, Arizona Trump currently leads Georgia E leads although they're really close. All these are within a point. And Molly knows. And we've talked before about how much I hate polling. So this
is why people like Meors are so obsessed. Now we haven't talked about the one other electoral vote we have to have, which is Nebraska too right and Nebraska to Nebraska and Maine do their state's weird or they allow their congressional districts to vote differently. And Nebraska two is one that Kamala Harris currently leads by seven points. And you had air Nebraska two with the three Midwestern states. If you just in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan, you get
to two hundred and sixty nine. And Molly is an expert on this. Two sixty nine means it's the tie the House of Representatives decides, and the Republicans controlled that process, so we'd lose the bree So you have to win Nebraska two. I was just there campaigning. I think we're going to win Nebraska two.
Oh, Nebraska too. I think Republicans did the worst possible thing. They tried to take away the point at the last minute. It didn't happen. So there's no world in which they're winning Nebraska too, Now, don't you agree?
I totally agree. And I think we're going to win that congressional seat too.
Yeah. And that's Don Bacon.
Right, correct. And Tony Vargas is the Democratic candidate state senator who is amazing, like an American success story who grew up poor and ended up being in Teach for America and is now now running for Congress. And I think he's going to win. And those are one of the seats that King Jeffreys absolutely needs to become Speaker of the House. But Tomali's ployt what have we learned in this last two election cycles. Don't try to stop
people from voting because it really pisses them off. And don't take away their rights, right, those are the two things that really animate people. You know, we saw this in twenty twenty two with the people who were election deniers, and we're seeing this now like Nebraska went from a tied race to them trying to change the rules to now Kamala Iris walking away with it because a whole bunch of people, usually women who are smarter than men, said fuck you, We're not going to allow you to
do this. And now Kama is walking away with it, and I think Tony Margus is going to win too.
There's an anxiety that I have heard from a number of fancy pundits quietly that she's not out there enough. Do you think that's right? And do you think she should be out there more? Is she's spending enough time camping, meeting, and also is walls out there enough?
I think everything, Well, you realize when you run a presidential campaign is you really only have three things. You have time, you have money, and you have volunteer effort. And so her issue is, you know, she's got to do all these things. She's building this jumbo seven forty seven plane as she's flying it. We've never had an election this fast, and so she's kind of got to
do everything. And she has a day job. So you know, when there is flooding all over the South, including in the battleground states of Georgia and North Carolina, she has to go deal with that. When there's a potential war in the Middle East. She has to go deal with that, and you know what, that's campaigning. That's okay because voters do have questions about how she would be as president, so let them see her do that stuff. And so
I hear this punnet stuff too. I think it's okay because we've just never had this close to an election days with swing voters who just don't have an opinion of her, And what they keep saying is they want to know more about her, and I think one way they get to know more about her is watch her in action.
I have also talked to less fancy pundits but still very smart who have said that her favorability numbers keep going up and his keep going down in a way that surprised them.
Yeah. Look, I think the biggest surprise is her, because when you looked at that her numbers when she was vice president, when Biden was still running, you would say, if Joe Biden would have gotten out, it shouldn't be
her because their numbers sucks so bad. And she becomes the nominee and continues to run a perfect campaign and in part about her right and she really her amazing starts about being excited and enthusiasm and then the perfect transition of the Democratic National Convention to seriousness, and then the debate where she just wiped his ass all over the floor. Yeah, it has been perfect and so normal.
Political pundits in the panicking ten square mile logic for his zone called washingde just couldn't have seen that happening, And it has happened the second thing, which we could see happening, but you kind of wondered whether it would which I think this story of this campaign for him
has been. The third time is not a charm, and he stuck at forty seven and a half points forty eight, like he just can't move, and he's giving them no reason to kind of go to get to do what he did in twenty sixteen people were getting twenty sixteen. In twenty twenty, he kind of ended the campaign pretty well and kind of got it that he had to be crazy and got it that he had to kind of close. Well, the wheels are coming off that bandwagon, and they have decided, and I don't think they're wrong.
I totally understand why they're doing this. They're decided they can't persuade any person to vote for him that is undecided. So They're just going to burn her to the ground out and that is their entire theory of the case. It may not be wrong, but he is just stuck and he can't move.
Yeah, so that's why they did the Vance pick right, talk to us about that.
Yep, they picked Vance because their whole theory was on the third time, there are a whole bunch of people who are not motivated. The donor class kind of hated him. His base was bitching. So they're like, look, this is a turnout election, and so we're in a straight turnout election. The way you got up the base is pick someone they're passionate about the way they get excited and JD. Vance is crazy and a bunch of big chunk of
their base is crazy. And so let's go pick someone who will make that sighting and it would go out there and throw a red meat to the wolves and get them excited about volunteering and being part of the third campaign because no one's excited. I saw this yesterday. I watched the Trump rally and they literally had to cut the room in half, and even then they couldn't sell it out. And this isn't a criticism on him,
like in the second Obama campaign. We didn't sell out our first announcement event in Ohio because everyone had seen Barack Obama hundred times. Right, it's just not exciting. And so they decided to double down on Mado with Jada Vance because they thought they were running against Joe Biden a thousand percent chance. If they knew they were unning against Kamala Harris, they would have picked a woman, and they would not have picked Jadadvance. Now they got Jade
Vance there, who just gives them nothing. Had a nice debate, went to the Yale debate team great, but doesn't give them anything new because he said so many crazy cat lady things. And so if you look at where Waltz's Waltson's in rural places talking to rural voters that they need to do a little bit better, which is exactly what he should be doing. Vance is doing Trump rallies. He's not talking to anyone new because he can't because
those voters aren't coming to those rallies. And so it's just it's a terrible pick for the race they're now in.
Do you think that Vance does energize the magabase there are now?
I think it's help well, I think a whole bunch of people. Well, I think he's done two things. The people that they really needed to write ten million dollar checks like Elon mu and Peter Thiel and those guys, you know, Jade Vance worked for them, so they think this is the thing, and they're writing checks like Molly and I get Cabernet, like they're just all in in a way they weren't in. And then second, you know, they do have him psyching up the base all over
the place, and that is helpful to them. And you know they've decided to outsource their field effort. And there's lots of people writing stories about this. Well, all the big outside Republican money people who are writing checks on that have Vance do events for that. They don't have Donald Trump do it because their doners don't want to hear Donald Trump. They think he's wacky. They want to hear Van who says the crazy things they only think about. And so on that score, he has been helpful.
It does seem like Vance is sort of able, and we saw this in the VP debate to sell trump Ism in a way that Trump that Trump. It's very distracting because Trump says things like childcare is childcare, whereas Vance says things that are not true, almost exclusively, but that that sound more like normal politicians.
Speaker. I debated this Republican operative yesterday for a client who will go nameless because he's actually a nice guy, and he said kind of the quiet part out loud. He's like, you know, Jim, I think you guys are going to win this election because Donald Trump's so bad, but you wait till the next wait mag of people who aren't as polarizing but are even more right wing, and that is Jade Dance. Like I looked at that debate the other night and said, holy fuck, I do
not want against this guy. And if she wins, you know, he'll be in first place to be the nominee in twenty twenty eight, which is why he took this, why he made the Faustian bargain with Donald Trump.
You know, I had the exact same thought when I watch that debate. I thought, it's not going to move the needle this time. But this is Trump is without Trump, and you really see how much Trump himself hurts him.
You know, Trump hurts himself and he hurts this insane like he is almost the single thing that is protecting us from the insane zelotray that is Project twenty twenty five, because twenty twenty five is not Trump, but it is the Republican Party, right, so like it will be you know when Trump, if Trump wins, they well they will make it happen because it is what they want. But
it's not necessarily what Trump wants. It's just that what Trump will go along with because he doesn't have any particular governing principles.
Correct, He's for Donald Trump and always has been and always will be. But there's a movement out there on their side, and that movement is embodied in Project twenty twenty five. And it's not democratic spin. It's not me just saying this me like it's true. And they had hundreds of people work for months on this and this was their crowning document. And Mike jd Vance wrote the forward for the guy who who was the head of Project twenty twenty five for his book. Yeah, like Kevin
Roberts Foundation, there is foundation. Yes, it's not some conspiracy, it is real. And so I think the future is actually a little more scary assuming we win here.
Thank you so much, Jim. I hope you'll come back anytime.
Thank you.
Are you concerned about Project twenty twenty five and how awful Trump's second term could be? Well, so are we, which is why we teamed up with iHeart to make a limited series with the experts on what a disaster Project twenty twenty five would be for America's future. Right now, we have just released the final episode of this five episode series. They're all available by looking up Molly Jong
Fast Project twenty twenty five on YouTube. And if you are more of a podcast person and not say a YouTuber, you can hit play and put your phone in the lock screen and it will play back just like a podcast. All five episodes are online now. We need to educate Americans on what Trump's second term would or could do to this country, so please watch it and spread the word. Peter S. Goodman is the global economics correspondent for The New York Times and author of How the World Ran
Out of Everything. Welcome to Fast Politics, Peter.
Goodman, thanks very much, great to be here.
So you have a book out, and then also we just had this nearly averted strike that happened. But first, the book is called How the World Ran out of Everything, and it was really like the pandemic was the first time any of us, Maybe not any of us, but the first time I realized how seamlessly the supply chain usually were.
Yeah, it was a very personal thing that caused me to write this book. I never thought I write a book about the global supply chain. I write about supply chains, but it seemed kind of wonky. And then it's the first wave of the pandemic. Living in London, have a newborn arrives. He's born on April eighth, twenty twenty, and my wife is stoic about the fact that I can only be in the hospital for an hour, her parents can't fly over from New York to help with the baby,
we can't go to the pediatrician. But where she really loses it. I remember this vividly. As we get home and she says, well, let's order some hand sanitizer. We can't find any online. I'm walking round our North London neighborhood, no hand sanitizer. Then we try to buy the ingredients to make our own hand sanitizer. Same story. She looks at me and she says, hey, you're supposed to know
how this stuff works. What's going on? And I realized that I didn't fully know, and as I started to dig into it, I realized that essentially, globalization as we knew it was not exactly unraveling, but it was failing. Yeah, and the sides had been there, and it required book late treatment to make sense of yeah exactly.
I think that what strikes me about this is we became this global world so quickly, and we had never had something like this where all of a sudden everything stopped right.
And it's one of those few things that we actually have faith in, you know, like whatever your politics are, or we may know that it's not necessarily savory to
rely on Amazon to the extent that we do. That they're not treating their warehouse workers well that you know, their Scuman rights violations in terms of this supply chain in places like Shinjong, and you know, we know all that, but we still assume you click the buy button, you wait maybe a couple of days, sometimes only a few hours, and a truck just magically shows up at your door. And when that breaks down in the middle of you know,
our darkest hour, it's pretty your wildering. It's kind of cosmically bewildering, and it turns out that all the pieces that are working behind the scenes to make this stuff happen are fascinating, which was something I didn't understand. So I actually dug in and started thinking about these people were invited to not think about truck drivers, longshore workers,
warehouse workers. I mean I spent a lot of time, you know, I rode around in a truck for three days through the frozen midsection of America to see what that's like up close. And when you start to realize that we're dependent upon all these people, I hope you'll never see a package the same way again.
Yeah, what we've seen with these supply chains is that there were so many weaknesses. Like I remember trying to get paper towels and you couldn't get paper towels. And I think that after this supply chain hiccup, it's like a little bit like the nineteen eighteen flu pandemic, which is that we did actually learn some lessons, right that
would changed. Like I think about chips and the chips and science acts right like they they manufact they started manufacturing chips in the United States, and that is because right what happened with the supply chain.
Yeah, we've learned some lessons, and that we haven't learned some lessons we've learned in the things that are strategic and deemed central to national security, like computer chips, like to a lesser extent, electric vehicles and batter you know, the Biden administration is at least tens of billions dollars
in subsidies to try to generate plants at home. Then big companies that have billions of dollars to throw around the like Walmart, they are shifting some of their production out of China to places like Mexico to serve the American market India, to get out from under the Chinese supply chain. Not abandoning China. It's more of sort of
like a portfolio shift in the margins. And there's more and more of a conversation about reshowing near, showing friends, showing, whatever term you want, de risking, you know, sort of not just pretending that there are no risks when we treat a factory across the ocean the same way as a factory, you know, down the street. And we've been invited to pretend that as long as there's container shipping in the Internet, we can just carry on as if
there are no risks. Those risks are now pretty explicit. On the other hand, the financial incentives that have pushed all of this stuff to low cost countries are still there. And we have had these shocks before, not as big as the pandemic. But you know, I wrote my first supply chain shock story back in nineteen ninety nine, where
there's an earthquake in Taiwan that hit computer chips. After Fukushima, the nuclear disaster in Japan at twenty eleven, it is at twenty twelve, a lot of people said, oh, we've overdone it with these long supply chains across the ocean. Let's think about reallocating, recalibrating, you know whatever. And we just carried on. Because any CEO of a publicly trading company who says, let's build an extra warehouse or you know, spend money in the name of versilience, that's an invitation
to lose your job. Whereas the CEO says, let's just keep doing it. We're going to rely heavily on China. We're going to go to the lowest cost providers. You know, there will be a shock, because there are inevitably shocks that will reveal the price of that. But with any luck that CEO will have cast their stock options, they'll be on a beach and a hammock, you know, with a cocktail. And that's still true.
Yeah, I think that's definitely true. So explain to us about the dock workers, because this is really you know, it's funny. I was somewhere with some political people and I said, like, what are you the most worried about? And everyone was like, the doc workers, Like that actually could be a disaster written all over it. Now, the Biden administration, which has been really, really really good with unions and has been rewarded by them by with nothing right.
I mean, these unions are not making endorsements despite the fact that Biden was the first person to go and the first president ever to walk on a picket line. Explain to us what happened with the dock workers.
First of all, yes, there was a nightmare scenario for the Biden administration if the strike had gone on. The dock workers. These are the people who load and unload container ships, which are like the workhorses of the modern global economy. They walked off the job on East Coast and Gulf Coast ports. We're talking about like forty five thousand people, shutting down fourteen major ports. And this raised
the prospect that we'd be talking about inflation again. If this strike had gone on longer, we'd have probably had floating traffic jams off of major ports. I mean, they were already starting to develop this risk that there'd be congestion out west because cargo the camp be unloaded at Newark or Savannah or Houston, you know, gets diverted to la or Long Beach, where a lot of people will remember we had cues stretching seventy ships. Yeah, so this
was indeed to night ersonary. The problem for Biden is that despite being seen as the most pro union president, you know, maybe ever that's how he'd liked to be seen. There are actually some bad memories about the rail strike within the labor book.
Oh yeah, that's right, talk about the rail strike.
Yeah. So there was no rail strike because Biden intervened. He enforced this settlement on the rail workers without paid sick leave, which was a source of real anger. And so the optics of waiting into this one he had at his disposal on nineteen forty seven law that taft hardly act. He could have said this the threat to national security.
Could have ordered an eighty day cooling off period, which Reagan did with the air traffic controllers. Right, Reagan intervened and actually fired air traffic controllers.
There have been other times in history when this Act has been invoked. Biden said he didn't want to do it. The optics would have been really bad. I mean, of course, yes, to your point, labor is a core democratic constituency. On the other hand, not waiting in every day that the strike went on raised the risk of product shortages, lots of anxiety, increased shipping rates, which would get filtered through as higher consumer presses, so there were no great options.
In the end, it seems like the White House managed to coax the parties back to the table to suspend the strike until January fifteen. There's still some huge outstanding issues, like the pace of automation. Dock workers look at robots as the things that are going to replace them. I mean, the history of container shipping is the story of shippers using technology to bypass the possibility that dock workers can
withdraw their labor and bring everything to a halt. But you know, the political ticking time bomb that was this strike is now for the moment taken off the table, and that's a pretty big deal for Harris.
Yeah, let's talk for two seconds about why you think the labor unions are not endorsing her. And I'm talking about there are two that I'm thinking about. One is the Fireman that was yesterday, and then the other one is this larger union, and then you had those small the teamsters. You had those smaller unions, the more local unions in the swing states endorsing her book. But why do you think that is?
You know, it's a very tricky dynamic. Because I am not going to say something original here. I mean the white working class, in particular in the industrialized parts of the country, like the Upper Midwest, there's a lot of rake and file support for Trump, and so the union leadership is stuck in a tough position. I mean, they understand that if Trump wins, there's no way he's going
to be friendly to labor. There's no chance he's going to put people in places of power, like at the National Labor Relations Board who are friendly to the labor agenda. On the other hand, you know, you look at places like Michigan, a key battleground state where the UAW came out early and endorsed Biden, and the rake and file was really split because Biden was pushing things like mandates for electric vehicles, which UAW rank and file workers look
at as a job killer in the immediate term. That you don't need as many people to make an electric vehicle as you do a conventional gas powered car. That's a very tricky dynamic.
Yeah, it's so striking to me because he really has been so focused, Like, I mean, if Trump gets in there, throw right to work laws.
I mean, Trump is the master at acting like a populist and promising lots of stuff, telling us that these tariffs that have already been demonstrated to be job killers in the places where they're supposed to bring jobs back, are going to get everybody working. You know, he's the master of the photo op. Right, Let's put tariffs on steel and go get a picture taken with a bunch of steel workers and a shuttered plant going back to work.
And never mind the fact that there are roughly eight times as many people who go to work at factories that buy steal as there are people who go to plants that make steal. But you know that's a footnote in a Department of Commerce report or some wonky blog post. The thing that leads is to picture of Trump with
a hard hat on standing next to steel workers. And this is a game he plays very well while he's gaining the support of people who actually have benefited from moving jobs overseas and basically doing the bidding of the investor class by promising tax cuts and deregulations.
To us sort of what has changed. We can get paper towels again, we can get purel but have there been lasting changes? I mean, are we prepared if something like this happens again? And also to sort of talk us through where we are right now with the supply chain.
Well, we're better prepared in areas where there were significant shortages the last time. So it was interesting. You know, in the run up to this doc worker strike, lots of companies, especially retailers, brought in lots of additional inventory in anticipation there'd be a problem, so we don't really have to worry about the holiday season. On the other hand, you look at an industry like automotive, where they're governed
by this mantra just in time. You know, we don't want to stash lots of parts and components in warehouses. That's a drain on our capital. Will rely on the just in time supply chain to deliver what we need at the assembly line in real time. And as a result to the strike, I had an automotive consultant tell me that auto plants in the US were sitting on maybe three days worth of inventory, with another week you know, somewhere on trucks, trains, some of that stuck on ships.
That's a sign that the shareholder interests are still paramount and are still preventing us from doing stuff that would actually be more resilient. And as long as you know, companies are managed for short term shareholder interests, we will continue to be vulnerable to the next shot.
Yeah, is that why it's so hard to get a handle on wages going up? I mean, is that why wages aren't going up? Actually now they are, but in some places they're not that wages we're not keeping pace with inflation.
Wage growth has actually been fairly healthy this year, and that's a sign. You know that unemployment's been really low for now several years, and so labor has greater leverage than it used to have. But you know, one of the things that I think doesn't get wrestled with enough, and in my book I really get into some detail. Here is the extent to which monopoly power determines much
of what happens in the economy. And a lot of rising prices and a lot of shortages reflect a kind of engineered scarcity where every time something bad happens to the rest of us, it's good for handful of companies that don't have enough competition. And you know, the ultimate thing we can look at today is so overnight as we're speaking, there's been a settlement to the stock worker strike. And you would think, well, that's good news for the
shipping companies. Right now there's stock workers who can load and unload cargo. Their stocks plunged on this news because the expectation with the investor class was so long as there were bottlenecks at ports, there'd be lots of anxiety amongst shippers and they'd be willing to pay whatever it costs to get their stuff onto ships, and so prices we're going to go up. And the settlement of the strike,
which is good news for the real economy. It's good news for workers, good news for consumers, not good news for the shipping carriers who are organized in these three alliances think like airline alliances, like you know, Star Alliance or One World or whatever, and they dominate the most lucrative routes from China to the West coast of the
United States, from Asia to Europe. So this is a sign that they can't lift prices, and that should tell us that there's something really out of whack in the way we're invited to think about this economy as being all about supply and demand. There's a lot of monopoly power and engineered scarcity.
Yeah, engineered scarcity. Talk to us about that more. How does that work exactly?
Take a look at the beef industry. So beef industry is controlled in the US by four companies that have an eighty five percent hold on the capacity to slaughter cattle. That's higher than during the robber barons. And that's a reflection of you know, excessive deregulation. Embrace of this idea both sides of the political aisle. The greater scale is good for consumers. Any merger that doesn't immediately lift prices should be welcomed, or at least government should get out
of the way. So now we got these four companies, the biggest of which JBS Foods is run by these two convicted felons, these brothers in Brazil who borrowed all this money under fraudul Remember.
These guys, Yeah, yeah, yeah, they did. They make a deal with the trumpet men.
Well, this is a story I tell on my book. So they got the Trump administration, not just them, by the way, but the other large meat packers to do the industry's bidding during the first wave of the pandemic, and they kept the slaughterhouses open. They deemed slaughterhouse workers essential workers. And they actually said they got the Trump administration Trump and executive order saying if the slaughterhouse is closed, that's a threat to the food supply. We're going to
go hungry, bike pants. Thanks slaughterhouse workers for the great sacrifice. Well, so I tell the story of this woman Tin I, who is a refugee from meandmar settled in Denver, gets a job of the JBS Foods slaughterhouse in Greeley, Colorado, is one of the first five people to die in this factory. Her daughter's begging her not to go to work, says this is going to be a super spreader event. She's telling me this story while she's holding her eighteen month old son, who's looking at a picture of the
grandmother that will never meet. And what I learned and revealed in writing this book is that at the time that the Trump administration drops this order, meatpackers like JBS Foods are sitting on record volumes of frozen meat. They're boosting exports around the world. So we basically condemned slaughterhouse workers to their deaths, not to feed Americans, but to pad the profit margins for monopolists like JBA Foods.
Yeah, can you explain to us what the Biden administration has done a little bit of how they've sort of tried to write the ship here and how Lena Khan has become the villain.
So the Biden administration has actually broken from this history. I mean, if you go back to Reagan and you go through both Bushes Obama Clinton, we get marinated in this idea that mergers are good, there's dynamism from scale, and the government should get out of the way. We essentially eliminate antitrust enforcement. Biden comes in, He actually names the shipping carriers for price gouging during the pandemic as
a source of inflation. He attacks the meatpackers and Lena Khan, who of course writes this landmark paper at Yale before she's heading the Federal Trade Commission, identifying Amazon as the sort of company that uses market concentration to create monopolies in new markets, hurting consumer earning small businesses. She takes over and she launches a probe of the meatpackers and in addition to bringing all these high profile cases against big tech companies. So that narrative has really changed.
But you know, this.
Election, everybody wants to fire her. Even Harris World wants to get rid of Lena Kahan.
Right, Well, we don't really know. We know that Harris is certainly willing to allow the donors who have given her such a huge fundraising advantage over Trump, to believe that if she wins, there's a chance that she'll fire Lena cop The optics of that would be horrible and she would face a backlash for actually delivering. But it's certainly been a good way to get moneyed people interested in this campaign.
Yeah, oh, it's so interesting. Thank you, thank you, thank you for coming on. Peter. I hope you'll come back.
Oh, i'd love to come back. Molly, thanks so much.
No moment, Oh fucker, Jesse Cannon Molly Jung fasts. So everyone's favorite New York City mayor? And by that I mean, well, it would be hard to choose a favorite when they're all so awful. Rudy Giuliani, he fucked up pretty bad. What are you seeing here?
I don't know that it's worse than all the other things Rudy Giuliani does. He allegedly sent a text message begging Michigan lawmakers to overturn the twenty twenty election result, but he sent it to the wrong number. I think that we should make a rule that if you're going to text someone and ask them to do crimes for you, you should make sure it's the right number.
Seems like a good rule.
That is our moment of fuck ray. That's it for this episode of Fast Politics. Tune in every Monday, Wednesday, Thursday and Saturday to hear the best minds in politics make sense of all the chaos. If you enjoyed this podcast, please send it to a friend or an enemy and keep the conversation going. Thanks for listening.